A Family Affair, Part One
by The Sparrow's Wing
Summary: Emily, Edward, and Carlisle are one happy little family, but tensions start to rise as more join the Cullen family. It could tear the Cullens apart or make them closer than ever...
1. Chapter 1

**A Family Affair**

**A/N: **This is the third story in my little series. If you haven't read _Cry Little Sister _(1) or _Golden _(2), you might want to since the plot line continues through all of them. Oh yeah, and if you've heard of it, you probably have since it doesn't belong to me. _  
_

**Chapter One**

By April of 1921, Ashland barely seemed to notice Dr. Cullen and his young wards anymore. Edward and I could actually walk down the streets without cringing internally at the thoughts directed towards us; Carlisle was able to spend whole shifts at the hospital without once seeing any of the married women in town, unless they were legitimately ill or injured.

We didn't mind. The attention they'd given us had startled even Carlisle, who had never known humans to warm so quickly to our kind. Most, he told us, trusted the instinct that told them we were dangerous; they didn't know why they'd think such beautiful people could be dangerous, and they didn't want to know why they thought that way.

Actually, we seemed happy to the citizens of Ashland, but we suffered in silence, especially Carlisle and myself. Here in this small city, we watched the young men and women fall in love, marry, and start families of their own. We watched this with a yearning to have the same, a yearning we would perhaps never fulfill.

Carlisle was glad at least to know that I felt the same as he once had and still did. Our yearning made us closer than anything before it; perhaps it was the shared feeling that we had once wanted more out of each other. But whatever it was, it soon made us nearly inseparable, except the long shifts Carlisle took at the hospital.

Edward, however, was torn over the matter. He was glad to see his sister so satisfied with this new existence; he'd worried unnecessarily that I would have chosen death, if I'd been given the choice. But his elation at the idea was mangled by his jealousy and his frustration. Jealousy of Carlisle, who had so easily taken me from him; frustration at himself for letting it happen.

I hated that I was doing this to him. I hated that no matter what I said or thought, he was always there in the back of my head, sulking silently, rummaging through my thoughts as easily as he rummaged through his own. But more than that, I hated that, despite myself, I was doing the exact same thing to him, poisoning his mind with my every thought, prying into the thoughts he wanted to hide.

We hated this unnatural connection between us, now more than ever. Carlisle, even with his experience of vampires other than ourselves, had never seen or heard of anything like this. He and I were walking back from Ashland's hospital early one morning when he queried silently, _Are you and Edward getting along any better?_

Doing my best to ignore Edward's angry grumble in my head, I gave Carlisle an angry glance that made him smile wearily. _I'll take that as a no._

"Of course, you should take it as a no, Carlisle!" I snapped uncharacteristically. He flinched mentally at my tone; almost immediately, I said softly, "I'm sorry, Carlisle. I didn't mean to snap at you. I just hate knowing that he's always there, no matter what I do or where I go."

Carlisle stopped walking so abruptly that I didn't notice for a moment. _Wait, what? _He wondered, watching me quizzically. _You can always hear him? Can he always hear you?_

Even Edward was interested from the small spot he had in the back of my head. He had stopped grumbling and was listening as intently as I. _Answer him, Emily, _he urged silently. I just nodded in response to Edward's demand and Carlisle's questions.

The look on Carlisle's face comforted neither of us. _Well, if we were normal for vampires, we aren't anymore, _I thought almost bitterly.

_We were hardly normal vampires to begin with, Emily,_ Edward reminded me. _Remember how Carlisle told us that there are few vampires with extra talents? Vampires are rare, extraordinarily gifted vampires are even rarer, and extraordinarily gifted vampires who have given up human blood are the rarest of them all. We're practically commodities._

_When you two are done arguing, _ Carlisle interjected quickly, curiosity burning in his every thought, _I'd like to find out more about this. _

"We're not arguing," I told him. The exact same words echoed through my head, thanks to Edward. If he'd been standing next to me, we probably would have said it simultaneously. The idea made us both laugh; Carlisle just looked perplexed, which was an odd expression to see on his perfect face.

Carlisle and I checked quickly that we were alone, then ran as fast as we could back to the house. Edward was standing on the front porch, waiting for us, gaging our nearness in my thoughts. I reached the porch several steps ahead of Carlisle and stopped at Edward's side; we both turned hopefully to Carlisle. "Do you know if this is normal, Carlisle?" Edward asked eagerly.

"I'm not sure," Carlisle replied aloud. He didn't like not knowing; it was starting to irritate him, but he was also eager to learn more. He ushered us inside to his study, asking as we went, "How long have you two known about this?"

Edward and I looked at each other for a moment. Neither of us could exactly pinpoint when we'd noticed. Then we knew. I had been drowning in fire, begging silently for death, writhing in pain when I'd noticed the pain separate from my own. Edward told Carlisle so.

Scribbling that down quickly, Carlisle started to ask another question.

But that wasn't right. I said abruptly, "No, that wasn't the first time." They both looked at me, eyebrows arched questioningly. It now seemed so long ago, when I had been human without Edward. But it was so crystal clear. _Emily, what are you talking about? _Edward questioned, moving to touch my elbow. His dark golden eyes were searching my face, trying to read there what he already knew but refused to acknowledge.

"I know you remember, Edward," I whispered, meeting his tortured eyes. "A crowd of drunken men chasing a helpless girl through the streets of Chicago. The voice of her dead brother being the only thing that keeps the girl running. The end coming so very near despite all the best efforts." _Emily, please stop, _Edward pleaded, closing his eyes and trying to forget the memory.

Carlisle was both clueless and frustrated. Edward clearly hadn't told him this story.

I turned to Carlisle and quickly explained what had happened. When I'd finished, Carlisle wrote for a few moments in a small notebook. Then he looked up at us and said, "I've not heard of two vampires sharing so mental a connection, but I had also never heard of two vampires sharing the same extra gift. It's rare, even among the Volturi or their guard. I mean, several talents are similar, such as you two and Aro of the Volturi can hear others' thoughts. I might have to write to some of my acquaintances; they might have some idea to how this can be."

He spent the next several days flipping through every medical text he could find, hoping to find some human evidence of unusual connections between twins. But he found nothing, and even if he had, he was not sure how easily it could apply to Edward and me. He also wrote to his acquaintances, just as he'd said, but none of the few who replied knew the answers to his questions. None of them had ever come across twin vampires, much less extraordinarily gifted twin vampires.

But Carlisle knew of at least two pairs. There was Edward and me, forming two-thirds of his small coven, and then there were Jane and Alec. They were just children when Aro changed them, burning at the stake as they were for witchcraft. He changed them merely for the potential of their vampire gifts, and they'd become the Volturi's most powerful weapons. Carlisle had seen their talents at work, had suffered briefly at Aro's command; my father-figure still shuddered to think of it, and as he remembered, Edward and I felt his pain and knew instantly why Alec and Jane were so powerful.

Edward and I quickly forgot our animosity towards each other. Edward had been right: he and I were practically commodities among vampires. We were lucky to have each other as well as a father who would have been glad to have the two of us even if we'd been lacking our extra gifts.

We couldn't have asked for more.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N: **I know I said I'd work on lengthening my chapters in the last two stories, but now I think these might be too long. If you could, please let me know when chapters are too long, too short, or just perfect. Thanks!

**Chapter Two**

As May slipped away into June, Carlisle, Edward, and I began our plans to leave Ashland. We hated to leave, but it was also necessary, as the citizens believed that Edward and I would both be off to the University of Chicago in the fall.

Several days before we'd decided to leave, Edward and I walked the short distance to the hospital so we could meet Carlisle for a final hunting trip. We were just entering the emergency ward when several distressed thoughts began echoing through our head: _but you can't leave...you haven't chosen a wife here yet...so many girls and women ache to know you intimately! _Edward and I exchanged irritated glances; the mental whines of the mayor and aldermen's wives were easily recognizable. We quickened our steps, just slowly enough we still appeared human, to offer Carlisle silent support.

Carlisle's office was comfortably sized if one considered the size of the hospital he ran. But it seemed to have shrunk in size that day, especially when filled with twelve matronly women (most of them rapidly speaking at once, each trying to make themselves heard) and Carlisle. Edward and I bit back hysterical laughter to see the distress in Carlisle's perfect face; all the women and their chattering were beginning to overwhelm him, which was an accomplishment in and of itself.

Edward and I were perfectly content to stand quietly in the hall, listening to the mayhem inside. But Carlisle abruptly thought wearily, _I know you two are out there; I heard your steps in the hall, even over this ruckus. Now get in here! This is partially about you two as well. _

We laughed so quietly only Carlisle could hear but obeyed anyway. But we couldn't get anymore than a few steps into the room because the women seemed to have taken up all the space. Carlisle was standing behind his desk, looking especially harassed, seeing as Mrs. Brady was so nearby. She was kneeling next to him, her hands clasped up towards him, tears glistening in her eyes, her voice pleading louder than the others'. She might have been a condemned commoner begging the handsome, young king for mercy.

The picture―Carlisle so unearthly beautiful he might have been an angel, Henrietta Brady so contrastingly plain beside him and so clearly mortal―might have been a great stained glass window in a Renaissance cathedral. Except that Carlisle would never be anyone's condemning or forgiving angel.

I glanced at Edward, tall and silent beside me; his brow was deeply furrowed in irritation and concern, his jaw tensed, his arms crossed threateningly across his chest, his long white hands balled into fists, his dark golden eyes flashing angrily onto each woman in the room. I touched his right hand, crushed between his left arm and his chest, and thought comfortingly, _I'll take care of this, Edward._ He didn't look at me but merely acknowledged me with one stiff jerk of his head.

Moving as quietly as a graveyard phantom at midnight, I stole through the small spaces between the women. Many realized I was near only when their skin pricked with the near cold of my passing; in the small, cramped room, I was a pinprick of coldness passing through the humid heat of late May, a pinprick cold enough that it needed no physical touch, only mere closeness.

Henrietta Brady did not notice the low murmur rising at my passing, nor did she notice the shivers rippling across her skin as I brushed past her. So she was quite startled when I appeared suddenly at Carlisle's elbow, murmuring quietly, "What's going on, Carlisle?" Her brow furrowed and her eyes narrowed to see how closely I stood to Carlisle, so close that I was nearly pressed along the line of his right arm.

The instant Carlisle realized I was there, he put his arm around me and drew me closer to his side. He said softly (for the humans) in my ear, "Mrs. Brady and the aldermen's wives have spent the better half of the afternoon trying to convince me to stay." I noticed that as he bent close, his lips lingered for a moment on a strand of my hair. It was something a dedicated lover might do to his sweetheart, not a father to his daughter. I felt my eyebrow arch in confusion, but Carlisle knew my confusion and pleaded silently, _Please, just play along._

That was when I finally heard it. So many 'voices' suddenly rushed through my head.

_Of course, he goes no further than his home...I assume it's so much easier to pretend she's nothing more than his young ward when she's really his beautiful young lover..._

_I should have guessed...don't know why no one noticed before...the girl's never far from the doctor's side...never see one without the other, especially since they came back from Chicago. Ah! I wonder, did they marry there, where their marriage would be scandal-less?_

_She probably begged him the first time, and now he can't refuse her...that may be the reason he's going with them to Chicago...can't bear to let his pretty young Emily go off to Chicago without him, where she can so easily replace him with someone younger and richer..._

_The tramp! She's probably threatened by all the young women he might have married...I'd bet everything I own that she's fawned over him from the moment she laid eyes on him...her sister most likely knew...the poor woman probably died of a broken heart, knowing her little sister was in love with her husband..._

_Emily, _Edward thought soothingly, _don't mind anything they think. We know the truth, and that's all that matters. Just play the game, and we'll settle everything quickly._

I nodded and said lightly to Carlisle, who was still nuzzling my neck, "Have they succeeded yet?"

Carlisle's eyes, now so dark that they were almost black, melted with gratitude as they landed on the small impish grin that was my admission into the game. _Thank you; you have no idea how long I've had to listen to this. _"No," he answered with a dazzling smile, "not yet."

"Excuse me for interrupting this private moment of yours, Dr. Cullen," Mrs. Brady, whose thoughts had been the most acidic of all, cut in suddenly, "but I'm sure we'd all like to know exactly what is going on here." She had risen to her feet and was facing us full-on, both hands resting on her hips, her face lined with anger.

Moving forward from his station at the door, Edward cut a swift path through the women in the room. He stopped on Carlisle's other side, smiled warmly at Carlisle and me, and asked with a quick, sly wink at us, "Isn't it obvious, ladies?"

Apparently it wasn't. They all looked dumbfounded. None of them answered, so Edward explained, "Carlisle and Emily love each other; they intend on marrying when we return to Chicago. It is, after all, a family affair; we'd hate to have a wedding without the rest of our family."

Most of the women left then, either warmed or disgruntled by the scene unfolding before them. Several murmured their congratulations; Carlisle and I could only smile at them in reply. We were excellent liars, at least to the humans, but we felt even a lie such as this was pushing it.

Mrs. Brady was soon the only woman remaining. Her thoughts were teeming with seething anger, and the mere look in her eyes was hostile enough that the three of us thought briefly of taking several steps away from her in fear. But Carlisle stood his ground and asked politely with a false edge of hardness, "Am I correct in assuming, Mrs. Brady, that you don't approve of Emily's and my plans of marrying when we return to Chicago?"

"Yes, Dr. Cullen, you are!" she snapped suddenly, so abruptly that Edward and I hadn't had enough time to read it in her thoughts. But we knew where the rest of this was going. She shouted angrily, "You let everyone in this town think you were a handsome, young widower taking care of your young wards! And there were plenty of women willing to help you raise them as they should be raised, but no, you weren't interested in anyone outside of your own home!"

She raised her hand to strike him, but my hand was suddenly clamped around her wrist, and I was standing between her and Carlisle.

Something in the way she'd been yelling so irately at Carlisle, taking one step forward like she was going to strike him, had made my temper flare. It was some basic, animal instinct to protect that made me pull Carlisle behind me and plant myself between Mrs. Brady and my father and brother. I was suddenly defending my family from the danger threatening them.

I'd moved too quickly for Mrs. Brady's eyes to notice. All she knew was that one moment, I was half-shielded by Carlisle's body and that in the next, I was shielding Carlisle and Edward both. I saw in her mind, now so filled with terror it was near incoherency, how she saw me.

What little human appearance I had was gone. My dark eyes―dark enough to strike a frightening contrast to my marble skin and bronze tresses―were filled with an indescribable anger; too many of my teeth were gleaming in the June sunlight. My fingers were wrapped too tightly around her wrist, slowly breaking her bones, and my icy skin was searing next to her warm-blooded heat.

She was terrified of me.

But that wasn't enough to stop me from growling at her, "Don't you touch him." I pushed her hand away with an eighth of the force I wanted to use and heard her whimper softly in relief. She started rubbing her wrist, where my sharp eyes had noticed the bruises already forming there beneath her skin. By the time they were a ring of purple around her wrist, Edward, Carlisle, and I would already be gone from this place.

_Quite a temper this one has, _Mrs. Brady thought bitterly. Her eyes were angry as she said sharply to me, "Your manners are clearly not what I thought they were, Miss Emily. You might want to work on that before you enter the university; not everyone kindly allows such lapses as your brother and lover do."

The smile I gave her in reply made her think of the kind a destroying angel would wear as it watched the world burn. I replied, my voice full of sarcastic politeness, "Thank you so much for pointing that out, Mrs. Brady. I'm sure you're right, as you usually are." My voice became low and cold as I took a step toward her, ignoring the small step she took away from me. "But I will protect Edward and Carlisle from anyone who dares to strike them. And I will do whatever it takes. I promise you that." I offered her another wicked smile and then told her, sarcasm dripping with my every word, "I hope very much that I'll see you again before Edward, Carlisle, and I leave for Chicago."

With that, I strode quickly from Carlisle's office, left the hospital completely, and started running the instant I hit the forest.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

When Edward found me, I was sitting high in the branches of a sycamore tree overlooking Ashland on Lake Superior. He scrambled lightly up the tree and gracefully sank cross-legged on the branch beside me. Following my gaze across the water sparkling in the sunset, he thought calmly, _Carlisle didn't appreciate your little outburst this afternoon, especially when you left him to clean up the mess._

I glared at him balefully. _I know, _I reminded him sourly._ If you heard it, I most certainly heard it too. _I paused, remembering Carlisle's soft voice as he apologized repeatedly to Mrs Brady. _"I don't know what made her act that way, Mrs. Brady," _he'd told her, _"but I assure you that she's never acted like that before." _Mrs. Brady had had her own theory about why I acted such, a theory involving my fluctuatinghormones that may have been a side effect of something far more scandalous.

A stray beam of sunlight slipped from behind the clouds on the horizon, interrupting my thoughts. It shattered in the instant it struck Edward's and my skin; we'd suddenly become living prisms or, perhaps more accurately, existing prisms. Normally we would have run from sunlight like this, but that afternoon, we were past caring. The ore dock looming at the far end of Chequamegon Bay had already been deserted for the day, and we were so far away that no human eye would be able to tell what was sparkling so brightly in the sunlight.

The island on which we sat had long been our refuge. It was so densely forested and so devoid of human life that we were free to do as we wished. The house that Carlisle had bought for us, though at least ten miles away, was only a short run and an even shorter swim away; both were isolated enough to make us comfortable.

Edward and I stayed in the sycamore until there were hardly any lights marking Ashland on the opposite shore. There was only three lights still burning, marking Carlisle's hospital. But otherwise, the only lights were the distant stars that were pulsing and moving slowly across the black velvet sky.

We sat under the stars for a while longer and silently discussed our next move. Then finally we sat together, not really discussing anything at all, just letting our minds wander. A few random notes drifted through Edward's mind, inspired by the distant diamond stars nestled in their velvet sky. Soon, before we could stop, we were singing silently.

But as it wove swiftly through our heads, our song grew to be too much for silence. It broke through into our voices, which rose above the trees, softly at first then louder and louder. Our voices wove together in the dark and rose up among the stars in the sky, the leaves on the trees, and the earth and water below us.

One last, soft, wavering note, and we were done. Somewhere in Ashland, there was a thought just a whisper in our minds: _Such a pretty song. I wonder where it came from?_ Edward and I smiled at each other. His arm wound around my shoulder and drew me to his chest; I laid my head in the crook of his neck, just as I had when we were both human.

Laying his head on top of mine, Edward thought with a sigh,_it's a shame we have to leave again. I was almost beginning to like it here._

_Me too, _ I murmured wordlessly. _But Carlisle was right: we cannot linger in any one place too long. They'll eventually grow suspicious when none of us age._

Edward sighed quietly. The sound was just a whisper that was lost in the wind, except to our ears. _Do you think we'll ever find somewhere to call home? _He wondered sadly.

I lifted my head from his shoulder to look up at his face. He was looking high above us, his liquid eyes fixed on the North Star. I touched his cheek and murmured, my thoughts echoing with every word, "We don't need a home, Edward, not when we have each other. We have a home as long as we have each other; that home is in all of us, in here." My fingers brushed the spot where his heart should have been beating in his chest.

A small, sad smile turned up the corners of Edward's lips. He held me closer, kissed my temple lightly, and thought affectionately, _you sound too much like Mother always did._ Our thoughts, edged with overwhelming love and intense longing, wandered to her for several moments. Then abruptly Edward whispered aloud, "Shall we go home? I'm sure Carlisle is waiting for us."

We rose to our feet and sprang lightly from our branch, landing lithely on the ground some sixty or seventy feet below us. Laughing loudly in the dark, we raced through the forest and launched ourselves gracefully into the water of the bay. Halfway across the bay, we broke the surface of the water, not of necessity but of want. Our laughs echoed across the water as we splashed each other playfully, cutting through the water effortlessly at the same time.

The forest was cool and silent when Edward and I came ghosting out of the water. I saw myself through Edward's eyes, Edward himself through my eyes, and we started to laugh again. Edward's hair, startlingly black against his alabaster skin, was plastered to his forehead; a single strand had fallen over his left eye. My own hair was just as black as Edward's, but it had fallen from its low twist at the base of my neck and streamed wetly down my back. Our clothes clung to our wet bodies, accentuating Edward's perfectly sculpted chest and my flawless curves.

We had never looked less human, except when we hunted.

I should have known what was coming. I should have noticed that the lights marking Carlisle's hospital had been extinguished; I should have noticd the single light burning deep in the forest, where our isolated house beckoned us in from the dark. I should have realized that even Edward and I wouldn't be enough for Carlisle.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four**

We knew what he'd done as soon as we stepped into the small clearing that surrounded the house. Even from where we stood just outside the tree line, we could so clearly hear the pleas for death and whimpers of pain.

Another was burning as we each had burned.

Carlisle's every thought was fixed on the beautiful young woman burning in front of him. He worried for her as he'd worried for me while I lay on my pyre; he remembered the single time he'd met her, nearly a decade before, when she'd come to his hospital with a broken leg.

Edward and I went into the house, moving silently through the halls and stopping just outside the parlor, where Carlisle sat with her. He never turned to us, but we knew he understood we were near. The water dripped off us, pattering softly on the carpet underfoot.

_They'd brought her to the morgue after you'd left,_ Carlisle explained without taking his eyes off the young woman's face._ A successful suicide attempt, or so they thought. But somehow, her heart was still beating. I remember how happy she'd been. She was only sixteen then, but she'd been so happy. I can't believe she came to this. _A frown turned down the corners of his mouth for only an instant, but then he smiled. _She's beautiful, isn't she?_

As much as I wanted to disagree, I couldn't. She was beautiful, even poised halfway between human beauty and immortal beauty. I could tell just by looking into her face, twisted by fire as it was, that she was older than the rest of us, maybe twenty-four or twenty-five. Her hair, tossed over the armrest of the chaise longue on which she lay, was maybe as long as mine but waving gently in billows of caramel.

I crossed the room and perched lightly on the edge of the chaise, carefully positioning myself so I wouldn't drip lakewater on her. Quietly I murmured, "Yes, she is. What's her name, Carlisle?"

"Esme," he answered. His voice wrapped around her name like a caress. If my heart had been beating, I'm sure it would have lurched in jealousy.

We sat with her for three days. There was almost always two of us with her, except on the second day when I forced Edward and Carlisle out of the room so I could dress her in clean clothes. They didn't fit perfectly because she was shorter than me and not as slim (although by no means overweight in the slightest) in the waist, but I decided it would do for the time being.

My heart and mind were battling one another again. My mind told me I should have been happy that Carlisle smiled at the mere thought of this beautiful Esme; my heart, however, hated the burning woman for taking him from me. I hated feeling so shallow, but I had never been rejected this way or any way, really. I was the spoiled young girl of the family again, sulking when things didn't happen the way I wanted them to happen.

Edward sat as a silent witness to my inner turmoil but made no attempts to help me. As he politely pointed out, nothing he said or thought could make me change my mind.

As twilight neared on the third day Esme'd been burning, Edward all but dragged Carlisle out of the house to hunt. He'd gone far too long without feeding, longer than we had ever seen him go, perhaps longer than he had in the beginning of his new existence. His eyes were as deep and black as obsidian; the dark circles under his eyes were startlingly jet black against his marble skin. He left only because Edward and I promised him that between the two of us, we'd keep an eye on Esme and alert him immediately when her transformation was nearly complete.

So I sat alone with Esme in the parlor as the last dying rays of the sun shone feebly through the thick trees. I had pulled a chair near the window and sat there bent over the worn pages of a book Carlisle had given me for Christmas, an anthology of Edgar Allan Poe's every published work that Carlisle had copied down while in Baltimore. My mind was three places at the same time: Esme's tortured, burning mind; Edward's mind, monitoring both my surroundings and his; and Carlisle's elegant calligraphy unraveling Poe's magnificient poetry and prose.

After a time, when the sky had grown dark, I heard softly, _I hear nothing. Am I left alone? _I looked up from my book, knowing immediately that the fire had slowed enough for rational thought to return to Esme. Edward had told me that as I lay burning on my pyre, the only thing that seemed to quiet my silent screams for death was Carlisle's soft voice whispering to me through the flames. So I returned to my page and read aloud softly, though just loud enough for Esme to hear through the inferno:

_Sleep on, sleep on, another hour__—_

_I would not break so calm a sleep,_

_To wake to sunshine and to show'r,_

_To smile and weep._

_Sleep on, sleep on, like sculptured thing,_

_Majestic, beautiful art thou;_

_Sure seraph shields thee with his wing_

_And fans thy brow__—_

_We would not deem thee child of earth,_

_For, O, angelic, is thy form!_

_But, that in heav'n_ _thou had'st thy birth,_

_Where comes no storm_

_To mar the bright the perfect flow'r,_

_But all is beautiful and still__—_

_And golden sands proclaim the hour _

_Which brings no ill,_

_Sleep on, sleep on, some fairy dream_

_Perchance is woven in thy sleep__—_

_But, O, thy spirit, calm, serene,_

_Must wake to weep._

As I finished, I fell silent. Edward and Carlisle were silent ghosts pale against the forest's darkness; Edward had alerted Carlisle in the instant he heard Esme's thoughts through mine. They disappeared as swiftly as phantoms and appeared behind me in the parlor so swiftly that a human might have thought they'd materialized out of nowhere.

_It's almost done, _Carlisle thought both to himself and to Edward and me as he knelt next to Esme. Indeed, her heart was speeding loudly in her chest, like the flutter of a bird's heart. Her mind was simultaneously wrapping around our silence, her racing heart, and the fading flames; the panic was rising with every beat of her heart.

Then, suddenly, a face we would never know rose in her mind: the small, precious face of a newborn boy. She thought sadly, longingly, _Samuel..._

Her heart gave one last painful lurch that yanked her shoulders off the chaise and then stopped abruptly.

* * *

**A/N: **The poem is an actual Edgar Allan Poe poem, although it's not one most people know. Don't think I made it because I don't think I could have.


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N: **Remember, if you've heard of it, I don't own it. And sorry this chapter's so short. Hopefully the next will be longer.

* * *

**Chapter Five**

Carlisle bent over her immediately, murmuring, "Esme?"

Her eyelids fluttered briefly, her long lashes black fringes against her pale cheeks. She seemed unwilling for an instant to obey; instead, she listened to our low breathing so nearby. But then her eyes opened, and her vivid crimson irises fixed on Carlisle's radiant face.

"Oh!" The small gasp of surprise slid past her lips before she could stop it; an already dim memory of a handsome young doctor smiling at her as he set her broken leg flashed through her mind.

I smiled. "She remembers you, Carlisle," I murmured to him.

Esme didn't turn in my direction or towards Edward's soft chuckle behind me. She was searching Carlisle's smiling face for any sign of the years that'd passed; he seemed to know this and told her with a light laugh, "I won't have changed a day since last you saw me, Esme. You, however, have changed much."

What I saw in their minds then broke my heart, even if it no longer had a beat.

They loved each other now; Carlisle would never again live this existence without the love for which he'd yearned, and Esme would never know this existence without this love.

Before Edward could stop me, I had thrown myself through the parlor window and fled, running from my broken heart.

Carlisle's voice called to me through the dark, but I ran from it as swiftly as I once would have run to it.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter Six**

Never before in my short existence had I wanted to die. But I longed for it now, to end this hollow pain of a frozen, broken heart.

I'd loved him both like a father and as more. I'd loved him as he wanted to be loved, though his love for me was no more than a father's for his daughter. Even as that emotion-ruled girl, even as I grieved for my lost brother, I'd loved him; he'd been perhaps the most important thing to me. And even when I knew he would never love me as I loved him, I still loved him, hoping vainly in my romantic heart that someday he'd love me in return.

But now he never would, and I would always remember this pain.

I ran through the night, not really knowing where I was going. My body acted of its own free will, and I was forced to follow. Luck at least was with me, blanketing dawn with heavy rainclouds as I walked into Madison, protecting me from the light that would have revealed me. In the train station, I told the ticket vendor that I'd run away from my abusive husband without a penny and was hoping to go to a place where he could never find me. The young man, wondering what sort of man would abuse such a beautiful wife, pitied me so greatly that he bought me a ticket to Rockwood, Colorado, with all the pocket money he had. I thanked him profusely before getting on the train that left at eight o'clock.

Edward could have so easily stopped me, could have caught up to me, could have taken me back to Carlisle and Esme. But he knew the pain I felt, let me run from the betrayal. _Go, Emily, _he ordered gently as I got onto the train to Rockwood. _I understand. Carlisle wants me to follow you, but I told him that you make this journey alone. You will find comfort only in solace, so I'll attempt to give it to you. I'm sorry._

With that, he was gone. In that moment, I loved him more than ever.

As the train sped across the plains, I sat alone and stared out the rain-streaked window without seeing the passing landscapes. There were only a few other passengers in the car, but they sat as far from me as possible in the small space; in his rounds, the conducter passed me by, even though he wondered repeatedly why such a beautiful young girl was travelling so far without an escort.

I remembered the smile that had brightened Carlisle's face as he looked upon Esme. He'd never felt that way before; it was new to him, changing him in ways he had never known possible. He'd finally found the love he'd longed for, searched for, but I had lost the love I'd longed and searched for.

The mere thought made my frozen heart break all over again. A tearless sob erupted from my chest, startling the silent passengers of the car. They all looked at me in alarm, but I ignored them. They were nothing to me; they knew nothing of the pain I knew, of the loss I'd suffered.

I sobbed for most of the train ride, wishing for tears to wipe away. My grief would never go away if I did not weep, but this immortal body did not allow for weeping, only the venom stinging in my eyes.

The train reached Rockwood several days later, but I hardly noticed. Here, high in the Rockies, it was snowing in June, so I was still safe from the sun. The townspeople noticed the beautiful, sobbing girl walking with her bronze head bent, disappearing onto the trail leading high into the mountains. They thought I'd come here to die, but death wouldn't come so easily for me.


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter Seven**

I roamed the mountain forest for several days, ranging farther north in the mountains for hunting. The forest did nothing to help me forget the hollow ache in my chest, where my heart should have been beating brokenly. Every moment of every day, I spent thinking of Carlisle and of the way I lost him. It was still as painful as it had been the first time; the mere memory made the grief burn worse.

The days and nights melted together for me until I'd lost count of how many had passed since I'd fled Ashland. Day fading into night and night brightening into day meant nothing to me because my sun―Carlisle's unearthly beautiful face―gone, was now meant for another. Time would be my only company, and I rejected even him.

In my grief, I must have seemed less dangerous. One day, as I lay curled in a ball at the base of an alpine tree, sobbing uncontrollably again, a mule deer doe stepped cautiously towards me. She sniffed the air, sensing the possibility of danger, but as she drew nearer, she grew more confident. Bending her graceful neck, she put her nose to my hair and inhaled my scent. Usually I would have smelled like a predator to her, but in this broken state, I was no danger to her. After a moment, she decided I was no threat and moved away several feet to graze. Her single fawn moved quietly out of the trees when he saw that his mother was still safe. The closeness of their thick blood didn't even set my throat burning.

Some time later (it may have been hours, days, weeks, or months later), I was perched in the branches of a spruce tree when there was a soft whisper in my mind: _Emily. _It was Edward, softly murmuring to me across the distance between us, apologetic for breaking his promise.

I sighed. _Yes, brother?_

_May I join you, wherever you may be? _His query was soft and polite, leaving the choice to me. I wondered sullenly why he would want to join me. _I'm worried you may never come back, _heanswered. The sorrow and pain echoed through his mind. I saw then how I had hurt him by leaving so abruptly; it only made my heart hurt worse. But he thought gently, _Please don't think that way, sister. You were hurting in ways I do not know, and if solace was the only comfort to heal the wounds to your heart, I would gladly give you that, no matter how it hurts me._

There was the strange stinging in my eyes again. I nodded, though he could not see, but he understood. For only a moment, he listened to the memories I was replaying for him. Then he promised, _I'll be there soon._

Days and nights swirled past me without my noticing or caring; then one night, very near to midnight, a breeze rustled through the branches of the tree in which I sat, wrapping me in a long-familiar scent I never would forget. Edward appeared silently through the dark and leapt lightly into the tree to settle near me. Leaning near, he kissed my cheek lightly and murmured warmly, "Greetings, sister. It's been so long."

I questioned softly, "How long have I been gone?"

Edward patted a strand of hair back into the low twist at the base of my neck before he replied, "Over a year. A year, four months, and twelve days, to be exact. You missed two of our birthdays. Happy birthday; we're technically twenty-one."

A year I'd spent away from my brother, the only family I knew. "I'm sorry, Edward. I did not mean to be gone so long."

He wrapped his arms around me and kissed my cheek again. "I know, Emily," Edward whispered, "you've no need to apologize." We fell silent for a moment.

The question between us hung heavy in the air. Finally Edward cleared his throat and said, still avoiding the question, "We left Ashland several days after you left." Hearing the query in my mind, he added, "We've moved into a closed resort on Crown Mountain just north of Vancouver. Carlisle thought it wisest to avoid the city and the suburbs, since Esme's had a few more problems adapting to the lifestyle than you did."

That made me feel a little better. But I didn't like the amused chuckle that accompanied his words. It meant to me that he was attached; it was the ultimate betrayal. I huffed through my nose and wormed out of his arms. Edward sighed, the low whisper full of remorse. "I know you want me to hate her, Emily," he told me, "and I tried out of my loyalty to you, but it's impossible―Esme is truly too sweet and adoring to hate." I huffed again in irritation, ignoring the low burn of his golden eyes on my face. Another sigh slid through his lips, although this one held more aggravation. He whispered, "At least give her a chance, Emily. She makes Carlisle happy; haven't you wanted that for him all along? Besides, having her in the family is almost like having a mother again."

He carefully considered my stone profile beside him. "She worries about you being on your own, and she misses you," he murmured softly.

I gave a small start at his words. She had known me for only a few moments and already worried about me like a mother for her daughter? "What?"

A small, weary smile turned up the corners of Edward's perfect mouth. He nodded and explained, "She remembers you reading to her through the fire; she misses hearing your voice, since it was the first thing she heard in this existence." His finger grazed lightly across my temple, brushing a stray curl behind my ear. "And losing you before knowing you makes her sad," he added. "It reminds her of losing her son Samuel."

I didn't reply, but the face of the small, beautiful infant rose to my mind. That brief image had haunted me in the moment I first saw it, although I had not thought of it since. Now it haunted me again; the infant reminded me strongly of Esme. The soft, downy curls covering his head had been the exact caramel color as Esme's, and his warm hazel eyes were identical to the eyes I'd seen in Carlisle's memories of the young Esme.

As a human, I had never longed for a family of my own. Several of my friends had married young and had become adoring mothers of their own children, but I had never wanted that for myself, had not yearned to be someone's wife or have children of my own.

So I had been unfamiliar with the heart wrenching pain that flitted with her son's face through Esme's mind. It was not the pain of fire but the pain of loss, achingly similar to the pain I'd known after Edward's death. But Esme's was stronger than mine had been, for she had carried her son for nine months, loved him everyday for nine months, loved him with a love only a mother could feel.

And now she missed me―a daughter she didn't know and had never seen―much as she missed her own son.

I broke down sobbing. Edward, silently listening to my thoughts, immediately took me in his arms and rocked me like a frightened child. He tried to quiet me, but hiding my face against his shoulder, I shook my head and sobbed even harder.

Who was I to reject the woman who just wanted to love me as a mother loves her daughter? Who was I to hate the woman who made Carlisle happy, who loved him as he loved her?

When my sobs had quieted, Edward and I returned home to Carlisle and Esme.


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter Eight**

I could tell instantly that the huge house was empty as Edward led me up the front steps onto the veranda. Edward opened the ornate front door easily and held it for me; he let it close softly behind him as he stepped inside after me.

It was impressive. The mansion had been abandoned since the beginning of the Great War, but in the year Carlisle, Edward, and Esme had lived here, they had made it as majestic as it had been before its abandonment. The thick carpet underfoot rendered our footsteps even more silently than usual; the walnut panels of the entry hall was gleaming dimly in the early sunrise.

In the middle of the front hall, on a polished walnut table, there was a vase of freshly picked wildflowers. Their soft fragrances hung lightly in the air, appealing enough to a human, but no human could truly appreciate the even softer, lingering mixture of parchment, leather, and cinnamon that I knew instantly as Carlisle's. Edward's all too familiar scent, which was closest to a mix of honey and lilac, was drifting over my shoulder. And now I could recognize Esme's lingering scent, though it was previously unfamiliar to me. The air nearest the wildflowers smelled sweetly of hyacinth, rose, and lavender; how fitting that the one who smells most like flowers would be the one to bring them into the house.

Edward chuckled behind me. "Yes, it is fitting, isn't it?" he agreed, stepping closer to my side. He sniffed the air delicately and said, "But now the house smells complete." Pausing dramatically, he put his face in my hair and took a deep breath. Then he smiled. "You smell like dew, honeysuckle, and something else I can't quite identify. Whatever it is, you smell like a summer night. Perhaps the most beautiful scent of it all."

I had to smile, a reflexive reaction to his compliments, no matter how far fetched. "Thank you, brother," I murmured. I listened to the sounds of the house's silence for a moment, but most of all the soft rustle of leaves brushing against an upstairs window. Turning to Edward, I queried softly, "Where are Carlisle and Esme?"

Taking my hand, Edward led me up the beautiful curved staircase. As I let my free hand trail along the polished railing, Edward explained, "I'm sure they're out hunting together. Carlisle was planning on heading north to Alaska for a few trips; he thinks we're starting to negatively affect the animal populations in the area."

He did something strange then. He rolled his eyes, not jokingly but disbelievingly, like he no longer believed in Carlisle's philosophy. For a brief instant, I saw that he no longer did, but he quickly banished the thought to the small corner of his mind hidden from me. I frowned but shook my head, not fully convinced he would so easily give up this life.

In order to change the subject, Edward told me, "The first room Carlisle and Esme set up when we moved in was your room. They were hoping that maybe you'd come back if they could make you feel at home. I knew that wasn't why you weren't coming back, but I let them believe whatever they wanted. It was easier that way." He stopped halfway down the hall in front of a door and lightly touched the brass doorknob. A small, wry smile slipped to his face, and he stated, opening the door gently, "Your room, sister."

I loved it instantly. The four-poster bed, though rendered useless by the fact that I never slept as a part of my nature, was covered with a deep sapphire coverlet of velvet, lines of silver twining along the edges. On the bed were several throw pillows in varying shades of silver; the tiebacks on the sapphire velvet curtains were also silver. Nestled in the middle of the numerous pillows, Manhattan sat upright, showing off his new silver ribbon. Beside the bed on the polished nightstand stood the framed picture of our parents, Edward, and me.

Edward left me then and returned downstairs to the large room where he'd put his piano. As his music started to drift up to me from below, I took advantage of his absence to dart down the hall to the bathroom we shared. There, I washed away the filth left by my year in the Colorado Rockies and changed into one of the clean day dresses that I'd found hanging in my closet.

As I sat at the vanity in my room, brushing out my long bronze waves, Edward finished his music and came up to join me. He came up behind me and took the brush from me, silently running it through my tresses.

Then suddenly below us, the front door quietly opened and shut again. Edward and I instantly froze, stopped even our breathing, fully aware that both Carlisle and Esme were thinking of us. Esme was still unfamiliar with my scent, so panic was freezing her into place. But Carlisle recognized it instantly and assured her softly, "It's all right, Esme. It's only Emily."

It was amazing how his voice made me forget everything I'd suffered in the last sixteen months. I ran from my room, flitted down the curved staircase, and hurtled into his arms, crying lightly, "Carlisle!" His arms wrapped around me and crushed me to his chest, yanking me off my feet for a moment.

Carlisle laughed loudly as he joyfully spun me in a circle. He set me back on my feet and said, "Emily, I'm so glad you've come back! I hated thinking you'd left us forever, and I worried..." He shuddered almost violently. He didn't finish the thought even in his head; it was too terrible for him to even think of, especially concerning me.

"Nothing would make me turn to that, Carlisle," I quickly promised him. Relief immediately flooded into his eyes, which were the same honey color as his hair, and the worry lines in his pale forehead disappeared. I smiled, for they made his absurdly youthful face look far too old. But my smile slipped when I remembered how he'd worried about me. I whispered, dropping my eyes from his radiant face, "I'm sorry."

His fingers brushed gently across my cheek, and as I lifted my eyes to his face again, he murmured with a sad smile, "No, I'm the one who should be sorry , Emily." He thought ruefully, _I know it's because of Esme._

I shook my head and told him softly, "No, that's not it, Carlisle. That's not it at all."

But it was, and I hated lying to him.


	9. Chapter 9

**A/N: **I'm sorry it took so long for me to update, but my school work started piling up, and I started to suffer from writer's block. Just as a warning, it might be a while before I post another chapter. (Oh by the way, I don't own Twilight, even if I wish I did.)

* * *

**Chapter Nine**

I hated lying to Esme even more. When I finally turned from Carlisle to greet her, she merely smiled and reached out to touch a strand of my hair gently. She murmured softly, letting her fingers roam across my face, "You're even more beautiful than Carlisle and Edward said you were." If it were possible, I might have blushed. But instead I bashfully lowered my eyes and thanked her in a whisper. She laughed lightly. "But they didn't mention that you were so shy," she teased.

Before I could reply or read it in her mind, Esme embraced me tightly. I wrapped my arms around her slender body and buried my face in her hair to hide from the guilt gnawing at me. She already loved me so much without even knowing me and had already missed me so much without knowing why I was gone; I didn't deserve her love, even as maternal as it was. I didn't deserve any love from this selfless creature who loved me as she did, and she didn't deserve any love I could ever offer her. She didn't deserve me as a daughter.

But she loved me anyway, even after I told her such. I didn't tell her that I'd fled because Carlisle loved her more than me, but she never asked. Esme never asked too much, never asked me to reveal what I didn't volunteer. Instead, she trusted me as a daughter and loved me as a daughter.

Esme was, just as Edward had promised, too sweet and adoring to hate. As I hid sulking in the Rockies, I thought I could never like her. But as each day dawned anew, I loved her more and more. She loved to catch me absently singing to myself; she loved to spend long hours brushing and plaiting my long hair; she loved to hear me read aloud, whether it was Shakespeare or _Jane Eyre _or one of Carlisle's medical texts.

Edward was right as usual. Having Esme in the family was like having a mother again. Perhaps I loved her because she was so like the mother of my memories, the beautiful woman whose face was already fading, the mother who had been my very dearest companion, especially as Edward raced headlong towards war. Perhaps I loved her because she made Carlisle happier than I'd ever seen him. He lit up every time she walked into the room, and I occasionally caught him following her around the house like a lovesick schoolboy or a motherless duckling.

As much as I came to love Esme, though, I couldn't forget how I had run away so abruptly. She had been quick to forgive me, and so had Carlisle, but Carlisle seemed to know I had lied to him. But neither of us were willing to discuss it. Until Carlisle made up his mind to talk about it.

Early one morning, seven weeks and three days after I returned home, a soft knock sounded on my bedroom door. I had been so immersed in the detailed ink drawing I had been working on all night that I jumped a little, actually caught by surprise. _Emily, _Carlisle thought politely, _may I come in?_

Ignoring Edward's low amused chuckle in the back of my head, I replied, "Of course." The door opened, and Carlisle stepped gracefully into the room, closing the door softly behind him. Judging by the turmoil in his thoughts, he was upset about something, but I couldn't quite tell what it was. He looked whiter than usual against the ebony wool overcoat and dark gray suit he'd worn to the hospital the previous night; the blue-gray scarf knotted around his neck was the same color I imagined his eyes might have been in his human life. He crossed to the window and let his eyes wander through the trees. He looked weary beyond his years in the weak morning light.

After a moment, he sighed and queried softly, finally turning from the window to me, "Emily, do you mind if we go for a walk?" I nodded, even though I had finally seen in his mind what he wanted to talk about. The instant I'd agreed, Carlisle crossed to my large closet and pulled out one of my winter cloaks. He helped me into it and led me out of the room, down the stairs, and out the front door.

We didn't speak until the house had disappeared through the trees. The snow had silenced the forest around us, and it had silenced us. I was doing my best to focus on anything but his thoughts: the ice encasing each twig, each needle on the trees; the blanketing silence echoing loudly; the delicate snowflakes, too small for a human's eyes to notice, swirling slowly from the sky and landing gently in Carlisle's golden hair.

Carlisle sighed again. It was soft and full of regret; I hated the sound. The sobs started burning in my chest. Then he said quietly, "Emily, I know why you ran away." He was standing behind me, but I couldn't turn to look at him. One look at his beautiful, tortured face, and I would lose all control of the emotions flooding through me.

One sob erupted from my chest, and I tried to bite it back quickly. He heard it anyway. He was instantly at my side, taking me in his arms and cradling me against his chest. I clung to him desperately; he was the single rock I could cling to in the heaving ocean of emotion that was threatening to drown me.

He was silent again. Even his thoughts were quiet. When my sobs slowed, he murmured, "Emily, I'm sorry I never loved you the way you wanted me to love you."

I looked up at him. Any girl or woman would have given everything in the world to have this unearthly angel open his heart to her. I realized now that I would have done the same, that I was no better than any mortal woman. And I would never have him. He belonged so wholly to another who loved him just the same.

But, as I looked up into the familiar golden eyes searching my own, I couldn't hate either of them. They loved each other more than I would ever understand, and they would never be the same again. I was lucky enough to have stood witness to such an event, for it so rarely occurred to anyone.

"No, Carlisle," I whispered, dropping my eyes and fingering his scarf, "you mustn't apologize. It isn't your fault; if it is anyone's fault, it's mine." He lifted my chin and looked questioningly into my eyes. With a soft sigh, I took his hand and explained quietly, "We each bring our strongest traits with us into this life: you brought your compassion and intelligence; Esme her overwhelming love for those she cares about; Edward and I our sensitivity to others' thoughts and the close relationship we share as twins. But I think I brought something else too."

One of Carlisle's fair eyebrows arched elegantly in the same instant his brow furrowed in confusion. I laughed softly, which only irritated him more. He hated not knowing. "I love you too much for my own good, Carlisle," I told him, "both in this life and the last." He pondered that for a moment, then admitted, _I don't understand. _"Even as I grieved for my brother," I answered, "I still loved you, wanted to run to find you because you had been the only one to comfort me. There was no place in this existence for my grief for my brother, not when we were together again. That emotion was gone from me just as my love for you was still within me."

Carlisle sighed regretfully. "Emily..."

But I cut across him, knowing exactly what he wanted to say, "No, Carlisle, don't think that. I love you and Esme too much to do anything of the sort." I touched the small worry line between his eyebrows gently with the tip of my finger and smiled to feel it melt away at my touch. Rising up on my toes, I kissed him sweetly on the cheek just as a daughter would kiss her father.

Carlisle's whisper in my ear was as soft and gentle as the minute, fragile snowflakes dancing lightly on the wind: "No father could have wished for a more perfect, beautiful daughter than the one I've been blessed with, Emily."

My eyes began to sting again, burning with tears of venom that would never be shed.


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter Ten**

Christmas seemed so much more special that year. My first Christmas in this existence had gone nearly uncelebrated, for Carlisle and Edward had been far more concerned with monitoring my thirst; Carlisle, Edward, and I had exchanged gifts the following Christmas, but it didn't seem so eventful when Carlisle was the only one surprised by his presents. And none of them had celebrated Christmas when I was gone.

Esme and I spent several days decorating the gigantic house from top to bottom, including the rooms we never frequented. The dining room table, although we would never use it and would surely never have guests who would use it, was set for twelve with the expensive china, silverware, and table linens we'd found in the sideboard. In the largest parlor on the first floor, a fire continually burned in the wide marble fireplace, the mantle of which had already been draped with greenery we had collected ourselves. We had also gone out into the forest, brought back the biggest fir tree we could find, placed it in a far corner of the main parlor, and then festively decked it out.

We were not the only ones who contributed to the Christmas spirit in the Cullen house that year. Edward, who had never quite enjoyed Christmas as much as I did, spent much of his free time at his piano, keeping Esme and me entertained with his continually varying renditions of Christmas carols. Carlisle often came home from his shifts in Vancouver laden with Christmas presents for the rest of us; Edward and I, and also Esme and I, had our own sojourns to Vancouver for presents. It was mind-boggling to watch the pile of presents slowly growing larger and larger with each passing day.

Most evenings found us in the parlor. Carlisle would pull his favorite armchair near the fire and read aloud from Charles Dickens' _A Christmas Carol_ as Esme would sit on the arm of his chair, absently playing with his hair, and Edward and I would sit together on the hearth, playing chess or checkers or a card game. To any humans who saw us, we might have been the perfect portrait of how a family should act during the Christmas season.

On Christmas Eve, we all went hunting together as our own sort of holiday feast. When we returned to the house around midnight, we settled near the fire again to listen to Carlisle's warm voice flowing liquidly over the Christmas story straight from the Bible. We were still there in front of the dying fire when the dawn broke clear and cold, the winter sunlight shattering brightly across our diamond skin.

Edward and I opened our presents only out of tradition, as we had known what they were all along, but we found far greater pleasure in watching Esme as she opened her own presents. I felt the venom burn my eyes again when she opened and sobbed to see the two presents Edward and I had made for her: an unnamed composition Edward had written for her and Carlisle, and the ink drawing I had done of the infant I would never know but loved nonetheless because Esme loved him.

But Esme was not the only one given such a surprise for Christmas. All the other presents had been opened when Esme murmured softly, "Carlisle, I think we may have missed one." She and Carlisle exchanged small, sly smiles, smiles that made me arch an eyebrow in confusion.

"Ah, thank you for reminding me, Esme, I forgot," Carlisle said warmly. He patted her hand and stated, "I'll go get it." Rising from his chair, he left the room so swiftly he was all but invisible.

I tried to focus on Carlisle's thoughts where they centered in his study, but Edward admonished sharply, "Stay out of his head, Emily, you'll ruin the surprise." I smiled slyly, but he added, "And stay out of Esme's too." My grin just widened. "Don't think you'll find it in my head, dear sister," he told me. "I've carefully hidden it away in the one place you'll never find it." The crooked grin he'd inherited from our father lit up his face. I just glared at him.

Then Carlisle appeared abruptly at my side, beaming widely and holding a thin carved jewelry box. I felt my eyebrow arch even higher and asked softly, "Carlisle, what's in the box?"

His answering smile was blinding in the sunlight. Behind me, Esme replied, "It's your final Christmas present, sweetheart." She ran a piece of my hair between her fingers for a moment and then stated, "Go on, dear, open it." Carlisle held it out for me.

I took it from him and slowly, gracefully sank into the armchair Carlisle had vacated only moments earlier. My fingers found the delicate latch and then the smooth edges of the lid, easing them both open gently. A gasp slipped from my chest before I could stop it.

Inside, nestled against ivory silk, was a necklace that was nearly indescribable. A single teardrop diamond hung delicately beneath a "v" of eight more diamonds; the finely spun silver chain glistened like a glittering coiled snake in the light. It must have cost them a fortune. I gingerly touched it with my index finger to make sure I was really seeing it.

"It's so beautiful," I murmured in disbelief. I looked up at Esme, Carlisle, and Edward, who all looked rather pleased at my reaction.

Esme took one step forward and kissed me sweetly on the cheek. "Just like you, dearest," she told me. She reached into the box, carefully picked up the necklace, and fastened it around my neck, where it lay cold against my skin. Esme's fingers centered the diamonds above my collarbones; with another smile, she stated, "It suits you."

My own fingers found the necklace of their own accord and lightly touched the teardrop diamond. I insisted, "You shouldn't have spent so much on me. This must have cost more than everything else."

Carlisle shook his head and explained, "Actually, it was given to us as a gift, well, more accurately, to Esme as a gift. But she wanted to give it to you instead."

I told them I didn't understand, so Edward queried, "Emily, do you remember Carlisle telling us about the Irish coven he'd befriended before leaving Britain for the continent?"

"Yes," I answered, "Siobhan, Liam, and Maggie. What do they have to do with this?"

Edward stated, smiling warmly, "They visited while you were gone. Maggie wanted to meet this beautiful vampire Carlisle wrote of so long ago and brought with her her mother's most precious jewels as a present for Carlisle's new 'companion,' as she so sweetly called you."

"But they were all quite surprised to learn that you were gone and that Esme had joined us," Carlisle added with another warm smile, "not to mention that they terrified Esme when they arrived."

Raising an eyebrow, I asked how. Esme explained, "Carlisle was at the hospital, and Edward was out hunting squirrels." I looked at Edward questioningly, who shrugged and thought, _I was bored, and it was actually fun. I'll have to show you sometime; we'll go this afternoon. _I laughed and turned back to Esme, who had been waiting impatiently for us to finish our conversation. She sighed, then continued, "I was in the library, reading _The Tempest,_ when I heard them downstairs. Maggie had insisted that Carlisle wouldn't be upset if they just let themselves into the house, but Siobhan and Liam were tentative about going much further than the entry hall. Of course, I had no idea at the time of who they were because Carlisle had neglected to mention them."

With a tight smile, Carlisle said, "Don't forget, Esme, that I was distracted by something else far more important. Such as attempting to find my runaway daughter." He glanced darkly at me; I smiled sheepishly and laughed weakly in reply.

The mood in the room suddenly lifted when Carlisle shrugged and said to me, "Maggie was most disappointed she didn't get to meet you. I had to promise her you'd go see her someday, so you'll have to since that unusual gift of hers leaves no room for lying." He noted the confused look on my face and clarified, "She can judge the truth in one's words, and she certainly uses it to her advantage. Edward found that out the hard way."

Edward settled onto the arm of the chair I occupied and grumbled in response to my silent question, "Carlisle returned before I did, and he didn't know where I'd been and asked me in front of them. There's not much dignity in hunting squirrels, so I lied and told him I had seen a mountain lion's tracks and had followed them far to the north. Unfortunately, Maggie knew I was lying and demanded as only she could that I tell the truth. Which of course I did." He glowered, but Carlisle and Esme both laughed.

I did also. From what I knew of Maggie from Carlisle's memories and stories, she certainly would have had a way of coercing my brother into telling the truth. Maggie was the epitome of young Irish girls: dark red curls, pale marble skin, and always dressed in emerald and gold. The only things about her that didn't fit the image were her brilliant crimson eyes that clashed strangely with her hair and her "unusual" thirst for human blood (although not so unusual for our kind). And according to Carlisle, she had such a sweet yet demanding nature that one felt obliged to give her the truth when she demanded it.

Letting my fingers brush across the cold silver again, I murmured, "Again, thank you." I leaned up to peck Edward on the cheek and stood up to embrace and kiss Esme and Carlisle.

If I had had the ability to sleep, I would have gone to sleep that night dreaming like a young girl of the most perfect Christmas she has known.


	11. Chapter 11

**A/N: **I am so sorry! Between all of my schoolwork and severe writer's block, it's been so long since I could update. Thankfully, though, Thanksgiving break is next week, so I'll have more time to write whatever I want. Oh yeah, for those who have forgotten, I don't own Twilight, even if I wish I could.

* * *

**Chapter Eleven**

But what would have been my dream would one day become my nightmare.

Carlisle and Esme married on April seventh, 1923, in the cathedral just down the street from the hospital where he'd been working for two years. I'd promised Esme that she would have the fairytale wedding that every girl and woman wanted because this marriage would not be as ill-favored as her first, so I spent three weeks designing the perfect dress for her and then another three weeks piecing it together out of the finest ivory silk that I could find in Vancouver. Edward and I had been the ones who decked the church with lilies and roses, and we had been the only witnesses to the event that took place at twilight, when the soft sunlight drifted through the stained glass windows and tinged our marble skin amethyst, sapphire, emerald, gold, and scarlet.

In my human life, I had attended too many weddings to remember. My parents, Edward, and I had been invited to the weddings of my father's coworkers at the law firm, and before the influenza epidemic, many of my friends and acquaintances had invited me to their own weddings. I remember vague memories of grand events that generally meant little to me.

But Carlisle and Esme's was different. Never had I seen two so in love, and even as we all shared small, sly smiles at "til death do us part," I knew it would take far more than death to tear them apart.

With much convincing from Edward and myself, they left Vancouver on the twenty-forth for the month-long honeymoon they deserved. They did not know at first where they were going, but when Edward and I went into the small town at the base of the mountain the first week of May, there were already two letters from them, one postmarked London, the other Paris.

Not long after they returned to Vancouver, Edward and I left it for our own sojourn across the sea. After all, Carlisle had promised young, little Maggie that I would visit her, and Esme in particular had begged that Edward go with me. Although she knew very well that I was perfectly capable of protecting myself, her mothering instinct did not want her only daughter traveling across a continent and an ocean alone.

Edward and I arrived in New York two hours before our ship left port. For our fellow passengers, we had adopted Carlisle's long-lost British accent and the story that we were siblings returning to London from boarding school for our mother's funeral. It gave our shipmates reason not to question why we remained in our first-class stateroom for the entire trip.

As part of our sojourn, Carlisle had reserved us the grandest suite in London's finest hotel. He had warned us that we would not easily adjust to the Irish coven's nomadic ways, so he had been kind to establish a sort of home away from home for us.

Of course, we had known none of this prior to leaving Vancouver. Instead we had learned it when the ship docked in Southampton, and we caught the thoughts of a very nervous-looking young man dressed in a neat three-piece suit and bowler hat. _That must be them, _he thought with a wringing of his hands, _they look exactly as Dr. Cullen promised they would._ He remembered the drawing that Carlisle had shown him; it was remarkably realistic, considering Carlisle had never shown a knack for drawing before. So to ease the young man's worries, Edward walked over to him and said politely with a warm smile that showed none of his gleaming teeth, "I assume you're looking for us?"

The young man looked absolutely petrified. He managed to stutter, "How...how...how could you know that, young sir?"

Dropping his voice to the soft lilt that seemed to calm most humans, Edward replied, "Usually when one looks at us such as you were and wringing his hands, I assume he's waiting on or looking for us." He politely held out his white hand. "My name is Edward Cullen," he revealed lightly."

The young man licked his lips nervously and glanced uneasily at Edward's hand for a moment before reaching out and shaking it quickly. _So cold._

Another smile turned up the corners of Edward's mouth. Gesturing over his shoulder to where I stood half a foot away, he added, "This is my twin sister, Emily." I dipped my head quickly out of courtesy.

" It's a pleasure to meet you, miss," the young man told me, tipping his hat slightly._ Bloody 'ell, she's a sight for sore eyes. _He turned back to Edward and said, "My name's Leslie, Mr. Edward. Your brother Dr. Cullen asked that I accompany you to London and make sure you're well settled."

While we were on the train from Southampton to London, Leslie talked very little, far too intimidated by Edward's and my overwhelming presence. He was under the assumption that our family was incredibly wealthy and worried that anything he said might insult us. So our private train compartment was silent for most of the two hour ride, which Edward and I spent in another of our silent conversations, this one regarding Carlisle's thoughtfulness and how Esme may have been involved as well.

Leslie accompanied us to the hotel, personally delivered us to our penthouse suite, and supplied us with the letter that Carlisle had charged him to give us. Although Edward and I both suspected that Carlisle had already given the young man a substantial amount of money, we sent him away nonetheless with a generous _lagniappe_.

It was touching to know that Carlisle and Esme had been thinking of us while on their honeymoon, as Carlisle's letter so sweetly implied:

_Dear Edward and Emily―_

_I hope that by the time these words waltz through your minds as easily as thoughts both your own and others', you have been delivered safely to your London haven._

_As I have known more of the nomadic life so many of our kind live more than I care to know, I did not expect either of you to adjust kindly to Siobhan, Liam, and Maggie's way of life. So while here in London with Esme, I have arranged that the suite should stay in our name so it may be a haven for you in a faraway city. _

_I have discussed matters with Siobhan and Liam, and they do not expect you to spend the entirety of your stay with them. They see London as the fatherland of your existence and therefore would not dare deprive you of knowing her as you know your native Chicago. Yet I feel I might warn you that they all greatly want to see the two of you, so Siobhan will use that unusual talent of hers to ensure that you will._

_My birth city has much to offer for the two of you, as I am sure you will no doubt find. Esme certainly found the city enchanting, and I may only hope that you will as well. I will let you learn about her on your own, yet I might suggest but one place to see._

_Out your suite's southern-facing window, a wooden steeple raises her iron cross out of London's smog and clouds of soot. This lofty spire marks where my faith was born and my ultimate fate decided._

_I hope that you enjoy the time you spend in London with only yourselves and in Ireland with Siobhan, Liam, and sweet little Maggie. But a small part of me prays you will return home._

_Your doting father,_

_Carlisle_

I turned to Edward and asked, "When would you like to go?"

Edward checked the watch that Esme and Carlisle had given him for Christmas and replied, "It's only six o'clock. We could publicly go for a little while and then go back later tonight, if you want." I nodded eagerly.

We owed Carlisle that much at least.


	12. Chapter 12

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**Chapter Twelve**

The quiet church that managed to stay cool even in the London heat aptly reminded me too much of Carlisle. It was all too easy to imagine this deathly quiet church filled to capacity on a sunny Sunday in 1663, the humble parishioners listening eagerly to their fiery, much-loved vicar Spenser Cullen. But in the foremost corner, nearest the alter, basking in the sunlight that filters through the stained glass window and paints his handsome face with a palette of colors, sits a young blond man whose gray-blue eyes are searching for some other future different from the one laid out before him. He doesn't notice the pretty brunette sitting near him, the one who glances at his handsome profile every few seconds and smiles, nor does he feel on his back both the fleeting peeks from his female admirers and the malicious glances from the men who consider themselves his rival.

_Emily,_ Edward interrupted with a wry smile, _your imagination is far too vivid for your own good. _I might have blushed if it were possible, but Edward assured me, slipping an arm around my shoulder in a brotherly embrace, _No, sister, it's a good thing. Your imagination is much more entertaining than most people's are. And much less graphic in so many ways. _He let a shudder echo through our minds to illustrate his point.

We lingered only a few moments more, just long enough to make our way to the front of the church and bow our heads quickly beneath the crucifix. We'd been hoping to stay just long enough that the deacon or vicar would not catch us, but it seemed that the young deacon had noticed us. He was waiting patiently for us to finish our prayer, wondering politely why we had come and what two so clearly blessed with both beauty and riches could pray for. When we turned to return down the center aisle, the young man was impeding our path. He said softly, "Good afternoon, good sir and gentle lady." Edward and I nodded our heads simultaneously and murmured a soft reply. The deacon queried politely, "If it would be not inappropriate, may I ask why you visited our church today?"

I glanced up shyly at Edward, as I always did in public, pretending to be the meek sister. He answered, "No, Deacon, your question is not inappropriate. My sister and I actually visited today because it is our ancestral church." The question went through the deacon's mind, but Edward waited until he asked it out loud to reply, "Two of our English ancestors were Spenser Cullen and his son Carlisle. Perhaps you've heard of them?"

The deacon's face lit up. "Oh sir!" he cried aloud, eagerly reaching to shake Edward's hand, even though he quickly withdrew it. "It is quite a pleasure to meet a descendant of Spenser Cullen himself! It was from his labors that this church was built in the dregs of London!" Edward forced a smile that might have looked genuine to anyone except those who knew him best.

But then the deacon's young face dimmed and grew stern. "But the histories say," he told us, now regarding us suspiciously, "that the Cullen line died when young Carlisle died in the witch hunt of the 1660s. Come, I will show you."

He led us into a long room directly behind the altar; here, on the walls were hung photographs, paintings, and drawings of the church's numerous vicars throughout history. The deacon led us to the far end and gestured at the aging drawing preserved behind glass that showed an achingly beautiful man I would have recognized anywhere. Touching the small brass plate beneath the drawing, the deacon read aloud, "Vicar Spenser Cullen and his son Carlisle, circa 1660s. Sought out the Devil's accomplices in London, costing young Carlisle his life and the Vicar his son."

For a moment, Edward's marble brow furrowed as his golden eyes studied the faded drawing. But then he said, "May I ask, Deacon, how one may think that after glimpsing our elder brother, who coincidentally is also named Carlisle?" He then pulled from his inner coat pocket a small photograph of Carlisle and Esme, and offered it to the deacon. As the young man took the photograph and compared it to the drawing in awe, Edward queried, "There is quite a resemblance, isn't there, Deacon?"

"How is this possible?" the deacon murmured, still awestruck at the similarities between the Carlisle of the 1660s and the present-day Carlisle.

At Edward's urging, I said quietly, "History is written by man, my dear deacon. And men do not always speak the truth, regardless of their intention." The deacon looked at me blankly for a few seconds, vaguely wondering why I would know so much about this. "My brothers and I believe that perhaps young Carlisle had no intention of following his father into the church and so faked his own death at the hands of Satan's imps," I explained, still in the same quiet voice that seemed to calm most humans. "But we cannot be sure because we have only the journals he kept while traveling the Continent. He wrote very little of England at all, except for a few short passages in which he yearns to return home but knows he cannot."

The deacon was quiet for a moment, slowly absorbing everything I'd told him. Then an image that looked vaguely familiar to Edward and me flashed through his mind: a large, dark patina crucifix nestled in the dusty velvet lining of an equally dark coffer.

Edward and I remembered simultaneously, although the memory was dim and bleeding into the dark abyss of time around the edges, for that was how we had seen it in Carlisle's mind.

_My father's voice, far below my hiding place in the steeple, calls my name__―__the name that makes him cringe, the name that reminds him too much of my long-dead mother who gave me so much from her kindhearted compassion to her eagerness for learning to even her fair hair and eyes. With a sigh, I leave Dante in his Inferno and hurry down the steep spiral staircase to the main chapel. In the instant he spots me, my father clicks his tongue in disapproval and admonishes, "The steeple is no place to find God, son. What would your mother say if she found her only son up there?" Of course he would mention her. But he shrugs and then tells me, clapping me on the shoulder, "Come, Carlisle, I want to show you what I just commissioned for the church." He leads me over to the large, ornately carved chest sitting just in front of the altar, and he opens the lid as carefully as he were lifting the lid on the chest of the Holy Grail. Nestled in the velvet is a dark, heavy crucifix too similar to my father's heart to offer much comfort._

"Will you take it with you when you return to your family?" the deacon asked us, having led us to the large coffer, barely sidetracking us from Carlisle's memory.

Finally giving the deacon his full attention, Edward nodded and answered, "Of course, we will, Deacon. Our brother will be very pleased to own such a piece of Cullen history. Now, if you'll excuse us, Deacon, I'm sure our brother and his wife have returned from their dinner with her parents."

"Of course, sir," the deacon told him with a small bow. "Would you like to take the crucifix now, or will you be coming back for it?"

I replied quickly, "We'll be taking it with us, for our ship back to New York leaves early tomorrow morning." The deacon began to protest our carrying such a heavy object to our hotel, but I assured him, "We'll be all right, Deacon. Our hotel is just down the street." He shrugged, no longer caring since he had just gotten rid of the ancient crucifix that had long been considered too much of an antique for the church.

When Edward and I returned to our hotel room twenty minutes later, we set the chest with our own steamer trunks. With his dazzling crooked grin, Edward queried, "Should we give it to Carlisle for his birthday or for Christmas?"

"Oh, can't we just give it to him because we can?" I questioned in reply with mock glee. Edward and I shared a grin, both of us knowing that we'd give it to him the instant we returned home.

* * *

**A/N: **Happy Thanksgiving to my readers! I'm really trying to post more often, but finals week is coming up in about three weeks, so I'll be crunched for time. If nothing happens between now and then, I apologize now and promise to post something during my 5-week winter break.


	13. Chapter 13

**A/N: **I am so very, very, very sorry! I had every intention of updating during Christmas break, but I hit a huge wall of writer's block and moved onto a story that will end up in the series farther down the road. But the guilt's been gnawing at me lately, so I buckled down and updated. I'm sorry that this chapter is so short, but it's a start. And I promise, more is to come. There's a really big event coming up pretty soon for the Cullen family, so I'm going to get to that as soon as I can. Thanks for being patient (or impatient, I don't mind).

* * *

**Chapter Thirteen**

They were already at the small clearing at a bend of the River Shannon where Carlisle had arranged that Edward and I would meet them. Sweet little Maggie, who had somehow managed to remain a child at heart even after so long, was dancing eagerly around the clearing, while Siobhan and Liam sat like living statues side-by-side in the center of the clearing.

Edward fearlessly stepped into the clearing, shook his soaked bronze hair out of his face, and said softly, "Hello again." At the sound of his voice, there was a loud squeal, and then a small, beautiful redheaded girl was in his arms. He embraced her and said, responding to the thoughts bouncing through her head, "It's wonderful to see you again too, Maggie." Then, as Siobhan and Liam drew up, he told them, "Siobhan, Liam, Maggie, I'd like to introduce you to my sister Emily."

I had hung back at the edge of the clearing, my every nerve stretched to its limit. Even as my mind‪―and Edward's as well―told me that I could trust these strangers because Carlisle trusted them, some primal instinct within me was warning me I could trust no one. Although I knew very well that none of these vampires would attack Edward or myself, every muscle in my body was tensed and prepared to defend both of us.

But I showed my wariness to no one but Edward, who knew me all too well, as I smiled brightly and glided forward to Edward's side. "Hello," I told them, extending my hand first to Siobhan, who Carlisle had said was the head of the coven. As Siobhan and then Liam shook my hand, I stated, "I'm terribly sorry I missed you when you visited in Vancouver. I was taking care of some personal problems."

Little Maggie raised an eyebrow and fixed those vivid red eyes on my eyes, trying to find the lie in my words. Only Edward noticed my small twitch as Maggie's eyes met mine; that bright, crimson shade was startling compared to my own family's liquid gold eyes. But I smiled to hear the same amazement in Maggie's thoughts. Seeing my smile and noticing Edward's out of the corner of her eye, Maggie beamed brightly and said aloud, "You're even prettier than they told me you were."

"Why thank you, Maggie," I told her lightly. "I might tell you the same thing. Carlisle's memories seemed to have done you no justice."

She squealed with delight at the truth she heard in my words and launched herself at me so hard that we both fell to the springy moss underfoot with a loud crack like thunder that echoed deafeningly in the clearing. But then the sound was replaced with Siobhan, Liam, and Edward's hearty laughter. Siobhan instructed with a mother's instincts, "Maggie, child, let Emily up. Her dress is far too beautiful to ruin in the mud."

Maggie agreed at once, sprang to her feet, and helped me to mine. Just as I opened my mouth to thank her, she abruptly reached up and started knocking away the moss and dirt that clung to my skirt. She startled me so, I must have jumped violently because Edward just started laughing again.

Taking my hand, Maggie looked up at me with those vivid eyes that seemed so young and so ancient at the same time. She smiled and stated, "There's just so much I want to show you."

I smiled at the rush of images streaming through her thoughts. "And I want to see it all," I told her warmly.

Never before had I seen such a radiant young girl.


	14. Chapter 14

**Chapter Fourteen**

Edward and I returned home on what would have been our twenty-second birthday just as the sun was setting behind the mountains. The last of the sun's dying rays still had enough heat in them that we could feel our skin warming ever so slightly; the woods were thick with the soft sounds of twilight falling. Between us we carried the heavy crucifix we'd brought for Carlisle, and although its weight meant nothing to us, we both felt weary.

They were waiting for us on the wide front veranda. The twilight's last, weakest rays were reflecting brokenly off their diamond skin, but what worry was there for them when we would be the only to see? No words were spoken between them, but their hands were intertwined, and that was enough for them. Just as it was enough for me to let go of my end of the large chest and to dash the last hundred yards to them.

Esme's arms wound around me, welcoming me as warmly as her loving thoughts: _I've missed you so, sweetheart._ As I nestled my face into Esme's caramel hair that smelled so sweetly of the mother I loved, I felt Carlisle's hand touch the top of my head and heard his greeting-_Welcome home, Emily._

"Oh, this is so unfair," Edward whined mockingly, coming up on the porch and setting Carlisle's present down. "Didn't anyone notice I was gone?"

Carlisle's laugh echoed through the twilight. He joked, his eyes glittering as brightly as his skin, "Of course we noticed you were gone, Edward. We just missed Emily more." _As if I could have a favorite between you,_he added as Edward drew near. With a brilliant grin, Carlisle reached out to tousle Edward's bronze hair.

I moved away from Esme and wrapped my arms around Carlisle's neck, murmuring his name. Just a few steps away, I could feel Edward embracing Esme, kissing her on the cheek, and telling her in reply to her mothering thoughts, "And I you, Esme."

Distance had certainly had no effect on the family love that bound us. But that love had seemed somehow incomplete with the four of us so far apart. It was a strange kind of pain: the kind I had not noticed until suddenly it was gone. And now it was abruptly gone, and I had not realized how much I had missed my mother and father.

"May I ask what you've brought back with you?" Carlisle asked suddenly, having spotted the carved chest Edward had placed next to the front door.

_May I show him, brother? _I queried.

He grinned at my eagerness. _Of course, sister, _he replied. _You were far more eager to give it to him than I was. _With a small chuckle that only I could hear, he gestured for me to continue.

Lifting the box as easily as it were paper, I brought it back to Carlisle and told him, "Edward and I brought you something from London. We thought of you the moment we saw it."

One of Carlisle's eyebrows arched sharply, and his curiosity seeped into his thoughts. He wasn't entirely sure if he wanted to know what we'd brought him. So caution and suspicion were making him move much slower than usual as he reached out to flip back the latch and lift the lid.

But he made a small strangled sound in his throat as soon as he saw the heavy crucifix in its nest of dusty velvet. It was almost a sob. The memory of the first time he'd seen this crucifix was long gone for him, finally having crumbled into the dust of his fragile human memories, but he still recognized the dark patina instantly. His white hands, the ones that had so gently held mine in those first hours of the loneliest times I would ever know, slowly lifted the crucifix from its velvet nest.

"My father's crucifix," he breathed softly in wonder. "I never thought I would see this again." Then he suddenly tore his eyes from the dark wood and let them land on Edward's and my gently smiling faces. "How did you find it?"

Still smiling gently, Edward replied, "With the help of an overcurious, helpful deacon." The question went through Carlisle's mind, but Edward said, "It's a long story. We'll explain later."

Laying his father's crucifix back in the chest and setting the whole thing aside, Carlisle smiled widely and said, "That's good, for Esme and I have our own gifts for you. After all, it is your birthday today." He and Esme must have been practicing while we were gone because as soon as the words were out of his mouth, they both pulled out velvet-wrapped boxes with elegant flourishes. Carlisle offered his to Edward, and Esme pressed hers into my hands.

_We'll open on the count of three,_ Edward and I agreed together. _One...two...three._

An involuntary gasp slid past my lips, and Edward's jaw went slack. What surprised us was not the silver necklace and bracelet set I'd been given or the silver cuff links and pocket-watch Edward had been given; in a family as wealthy as ours, such expensive gifts were not uncommon. What surprised us was the silver and sapphire-enameled crest that adorned each piece.

A silver lion reared his kingly head and mighty paw under the silver hand of God. The lion's three, heavy, grounded paws rested on a silver chevron into which the outlines of three shamrocks had been cut. It might have been the crest of one of Europe's greatest royal families.

For a moment, Carlisle was abruptly the mind reader in the family. One look at Edward's and my awed faces, and he knew immediately the single thought running through both our heads. He explained, "It's the Cullen family crest and had been for many generations since the Norman conquest of England One of my ancestors carried the crest on his Crusade to the Holy Land under Richard the Lionhearted. When it seemed that the Cullen line had died out in the sixteen-sixties, the crest disappeared into the fading pages of history. But as an overcurious, helpful deacon showed her around one of present-day London's oldest churches, a sharp-eyed young woman noticed a silver ring in a display case and that it was described as belonging to the church's great vicar Spenser Cullen."

Esme might have blushed if it were possible. I smiled at her, and that was when I finally noticed the gold bracelet glinting at her delicate wrist. When I turned back to Carlisle, I saw the silver ring he wore in place of a wedding band.

And I understood. None of us had questioned or protested taking Carlisle's name, for it made our lies flow so much easier and because we were all of us a family regardless of name. But now we would be declaring ourselves as Cullens for all the world to know.

In wordless silences, Edward and I declared our devotion. He slid the pocket watch into the pocket of his waistcoat in the same instant that I slipped the silver necklace over my head and let the pendant fall against my skin.

The look of utter relief that swept over Carlisle's face stung a little.

As if he could have so little faith in us.


	15. Chapter 15

**Chapter Fifteen**

But we had so little faith in each other.

Four years of denial on both our parts. Four years of attempting to ignore the cold, hard truth that had begun to rear its ugly, grotesque head between us. Until finally we could not go on ignoring it, until it finally struck us both.

April nineteenth, 1927, was the day my world fell apart. Carlisle had decided that we had spent too much time in Vancouver; down at the hospital, he was already claiming thirty-two, even though he could barely pass for twenty-five, and if we didn't leave soon, his colleagues would begin to wonder. So he and Esme had been away for a week, hoping to find our next home in the faraway state of Maine in a tiny coastal town called Collinsport.

The only sounds drifting through the huge mansion that day were the soft, tinkling notes of Edward's piano and the quiet murmur of my paintbrush against the canvas. Then, suddenly, the music stopped, and Edward's voice called up the wide staircase, "May I speak to you?"

If my heart had been beating, it would have wrenched painfully. The day had come. He was leaving. Leaving the family. Leaving Carlisle's way of life. Leaving me.

And I hated him for it. My fist clenched involuntarily and pulverized the paintbrush in my hand, sprinkling splinters and paint onto the hardwood floor.

Before I'd truly made up my mind to face him, my body had already decided and was standing in front of him. He stood at the bottom of the staircase, I on the third step from the bottom, so he was certainly near enough to see the betrayal in my eyes. "You knew this was coming, Emily," he reminded me sharply. "You can't blame me for everything."

"Except that I am," I snapped bitterly, although we both knew how much I sounded like a wounded child in that moment. "I'm not the one abandoning our family to become a murderer of innocents!"

His hand whipped out so quickly that I did not see it in his mind or with my own eyes. Had I been human, the blow would have snapped my neck and sent my body flying in the same instant. But I was no human, and the only pain I knew in that moment was not bodily.

The snarl ripping from his chest mangled his next words: "And I'm not the one pretending to ignore the very core of my existence!" His lips drew back from his glistening teeth in a menacing sneer. "Goodbye, sister," he half-snarled. "I'm leaving this house of denial for good."

He was very near the front door when I finally found the words I would use against him as weapons. "Our parents would roll over in their graves to see their only son a coward."

As he slowly turned to face me, I could see the fury glowing in his nearly ebony eyes. It was dishonorable to even mention our much-loved parents who had been dead nearly a decade, but this was no longer a fair fight. And it was the truth--our mother would have been appalled and our father ashamed that their beloved Edward would do this to his sister and adopted mother and father.

"How am I the coward here, sister?" Edward asked in a low whisper that anyone else would have found frightening. He could have so easily found the answer in my thoughts, but he-I had in so many moments in my young existence-to hear the words out loud. They held a different weight when spoken aloud.

I sounded just as threatening and terrifying as he when I replied, "Only a coward would leave without an explanation to the father who brought them to this existence and the mother who loves them so absolutely."

It was another dishonorable blow, mentioning Carlisle and Esme, and it made Edward's nostrils flare angrily. His jaw clenched and his eyes narrowed, but his lips curled in a dangerous smile and his voice was as smooth as velvet: "Then I suppose you may call me a coward, sister, but at least I do not hopelessly yearn for a happily married man." He offered me a small, mocking bow and disappeared out the door, shutting it softly behind him.

The cool spring night echoed with my voice as I shouted angrily at his retreating form, having followed him outside onto the porch, "You're not the brother I've loved!"

As soon as the words hung heavy in the air, Edward shoved off powerfully from the dirt road and was gone from sight in two quick bounds. The venom burned in my eyes, and I thought of the framed picture sitting on my nightstand.

He'd been gone from my life before. But I loved him then, and his decision to leave me was not one he made of his free will. And we had been reunited in the end.

But now I could live four hundred years and be happy if I never saw him again. He had forsaken our families--Masen and Cullen both. By leaving the family and Carlisle's way of life, he was betraying both the adopted parents who loved him as completely as if he were their natural son and the sister he'd had in both his human life and in this cruel existence.

And I hated him.

Carlisle and Esme returned in the darkest hours just before dawn the next morning. By then, I had already thrown the Masen family picture from the second floor landing so hard that it had broken the table in the entrance hall, which was now littered with splintered wood and broken glass. And I had also ransacked Edward's room, tearing it and most of the possessions he'd left apart, leaving anything that wasn't his like the books he'd borrowed from Carlisle.

I had done all of this in a fit of rage so consuming that I had no chance to keep myself in check. It was much like the way the burning, blinding thirst finally defeated Carlisle in that painful first year of his long existence. Just as Carlisle had been, I was victim to a tumultous emotion that had bound my free will in chains and then claimed authority over my every cell.

But when the rage had burned out, I sank to my knees, sobbing.

This was how Carlisle and Esme had found me: slumped on the floor in front of Edward's piano, sobbing hysterically.

The piano had so nearly met the same fate as the picture--crushed and broken by my own hand. But it was not just Edward's piano; it had also been my mother's, and the painful, already fading memory of her face was the only thing that stopped me from destroying it. And the shame of having let my brother leave so easily was so overwhelming and so devastating that I was ashamed to even think of her because she would have wept to see our family divided.

In that moment, I was the same broken girl who had wept for the brother she'd lost.


	16. Chapter 16

**A/N: **Just a reminder, I don't own Twilight, even though it would be awesome if I did.

* * *

**Chapter Sixteen**

I recognized the sound of Emily's sobbing long before Esme did. The sound was so heartbreaking and stirred up memories I had buried a long time ago because it was too painful to think of the night when I ultimately ruined her life. It had been almost nine years since I'd first felt the searing weight of her fragile human body in my arms, but merely hearing her heartbreaking sobs conjured up the ghosts of what would be become a fateful night in Emily's far-too brief human life.

In that single heartwrenching sound, I forgot everything but the daughter I loved. She was the only thing that existed to me in that flashing, excruciating second. And I was the only one who could reach out to her in the darkness.

With every step that drew me nearer to my wounded daughter, my thoughts grew darker and darker. The only thing that could make Emily cry out so would be to lose her brother again, and I thought immediately of Aro. He was always searching for new and unusual talent to add to his prized collection, and he would surely crown Edward and Emily the most prized of all his collection. But he would know in an instant, thanks to his own brother's strange and often useful talent, the strength of the relationship between the two, and he would know instantly how to gain them to his side. To gain power over one would mean, with their unusual and intertwined minds, he would gain power over them both. And he had no reservations when it came to adding to his collection.

And that terrified me more than anything. Not only did Aro treasure unique talents, but he also cherished physical beauty. It made life easier for the Volturi when they had beautiful women to lure their prey to their deaths. Which meant that were Aro forced to choose between Edward or Emily, he would almost certainly pick Emily. And to break her bonds with our family and to tie them to his own, he would threaten to destroy the brother she loved unless she joined him, but once she'd agreed, he would have no qualms of going back on his word.

There was no trace of anyone outside of the family having been there, and there was no thick, incense-scented cloud of purple smoke hanging over the house.

That was little comfort, though. It had merely cleared my friend of an atrocity for which, had it taken place, I would never be able to forgive him. But the huge mansion was still echoing with Emily's sobbing, and I still didn't know why.

I followed her sobbing through the house, barely noticing the pile of splintered wood in the middle of the entrance hall. Finally I found her in the parlor, crumpled on the floor near her brother's piano.

In less than a second, I had pulled her into my arms in the same instant that she'd cried out my name. She clung to me like a frightened child and sobbed brokenly against my chest, clutching a handful of my shirt. Her sobs did not slow or quiet, but I knew my presence comforted her just as it had all those years ago.

Esme flitted into the room several seconds later, worry growing in her eyes. She was just as worried about Emily as I was, worried over her only daughter the way a mother should. Kneeling next to us, she listened to the rest of the house for an instant. "Carlisle," she murmured almost soundlessly, "Edward's not in the house, and this was smashed in the front hall." She held out her hand to me to show me what she'd found.

It was the picture that Emily had always kept on her nightstand. One of the only mementos from her human life. The only one that would let her remember the faces of the parents she'd had once. I had always envied her for that tiny keepsake of a happy, loving human family, and now it was sadly looking up at me from a twisted metal frame and a few fragments of broken glass. Untangling a hand from Emily's hair, I reached out and gently brushed my fingertips across Edward and Emily's strangely similar faces.

Emily wailed loudly then. The sound made my heart, though frozen for more years than even I cared to admit, lurch painfully in my chest. It stirred up more painful memories, now of the night when I'd damned her to this existence.

_She goes limp in my arms. Remembering how Edward had tensed and twitched in a final reflex reaction to fight me off, I panic for an instant. There are only two explanations for her lack of response: she was too far gone for even the venom to save, or I had accidentally snapped her neck. As soon as the thought goes through my mind, though, Edward snarls angrily, "You killed my sister!" I open my mouth to reply, but before I can get a single syllable out, she lets out a horrific scream that makes both of us jump violently._

"Carlisle, please!" Emily wailed against my chest, sobbing harder at her brother's enraged face of my memory. She whimpered, "I never want to hear his name again!"

Despite the pain it would put her through, I had to ask her. I gently pushed her away and lifted her chin until our eyes met. Keeping my voice soft, I questioned with a calm I didn't truly feel, "Emily, what happened?"

She tore her gaze away from mine and hid her face in her hands. Then she admitted, hiding her words behind tremendous sobs, "Carlisle, he left!"

One look into Esme's face, and I could almost feel her heart break. She tried to suppress a loud sob but didn't quite succeed; she didn't want to know the details anymore than I did.

But I asked softly, still keeping my voice smooth with the calm assurance that didn't exist in that moment, "Emily, why did he leave?" Somehow, I couldn't bring myself to say or think his name, not when I knew how much pain it would bring to her.

It was then that she uncovered her face and looked me square in the eye. Her voice was even as she explained, "He thinks we've been living in denial; he hates pretending to ignore what we really are."

For a fleeting moment, I worried that Emily agreed with him. But then her fingers were brushing comfortingly across my cheek, and she murmured, her eyes melting with devotion, "Edward and I may agree on so many things, Carlisle, but not this one."

And her warm smile somehow made everything seem a little better, even as horrible as it all was.


	17. Chapter 17

**A/N: **Sorry about the wait, but several school papers and severe writer's block were dropped on me lately. From here on out, though, things should flow much easier, so updates will hopefully become more frequent than usual.

* * *

**Chapter Seventeen**

Carlisle and Esme were both extremely upset that Edward had left without telling them why, but they were also extremely grateful that I had remained behind. It was hard enough for them to lose Edward, but it would have been excruciating to lose both of us.

Three days after Edward abandoned us, we left Vancouver. It was our original plan to hunt one last time in the dense, wildlife-rich forests of the Canadian Rockies. But our plans rarely went as smoothly as we could hope.

Carlisle had taken the lead on the hunt, having caught the familiar scent of mountain lion. Esme was close behind him, staying near his side as always. I, however, had trailed behind, drawn towards the huge puma high above me in the branches. It was watching Carlisle and Esme, stalking their every move, and waiting for its chance to pounce; the end of its tail twitched like a housecat's, and it hadn't noticed me yet.

And then a different landscape suddenly unfurled in front of me.

_The city around me does not sleep in this heavy darkness, merely dozes. Often, when a hush blankets the city, it is sharply broken by the shrill whistle of a train. Unheard to less sensitive human ears, there are often soft screams and maniacal laughter that puncture the darkness here and there. It is to these sounds that I am drawn to in the shadows that cloak me in horror._

_As I move silently down the street, I see the flicker of a gruesome image in a passerby's thoughts: a young woman, no older than twenty perhaps, her delicate face split open and bruised by a fist, her glazed eyes still searching for help she will never find, the crimson pool beneath her head slowly spreading across the rough stone. The man has already passed me going the opposite direction, but I turn and lengthen my stride to catch up with him._

_  
He is going back to her, to relive the power he feels with each kill, and I follow silently. Already he has killed three young women, not including the one whose lifeless body has already flitted through his thoughts, but in a city this size, there are far too few policemen to find past criminals and far too many hiding places to worry about being raided or discovered. He thinks he is safe from punishment for his crimes, but he has not yet spotted me behind him and does not know what sort of judgment I bring with me._

_He moves down the dark alley with no thought to the pale figure moving silently behind him. He thinks only of reliving that instant where he held yet another life in his hands, thinks only of those innocent young women who begged and pleaded and fought for their lives in their last moments in this world._

_I follow him silently down a staircase leading underground to the place where he has left the broken, defeated body of his latest victim. This place is buried deep within the belly of the earth, and he moves through the darkness only by memory and familiarity. When he reaches the small, secret room where he has hidden her, I wait in the shadows as he kneels in the corner to light the small lantern there._

_The room fills suddenly with light, but he does not see me. He sees only the defeated young woman eternally interred in this stone tomb deep within the earth. Moving to kneel beside her lifeless form, he brushes back a strand of hair from her glazed eyes and sneers quietly, "It really is a shame that you decided to fight back, my dear. You were a pretty little thing."_

"_Indeed, she was," I say softly, finally stepping out of the shadows and into the pool of light. He jumps violently to his feet, wheels to face me, and demands to know who I am. I offer him a small, villainous smile but otherwise do not reply; I take a few short steps and then slip into an elegant crouch next to the young woman. Her blood has cooled for many hours already, so it does not call to me with a siren's song. But her glassy eyes--a familiar, heartbreaking shade of light green--seem to lock on mine and beg for the release of her young soul that he has condemned to purgatory on Earth, this place where the afterlife she deserves will always allude her._

_Those glassy, emerald eyes see me for the monster that I am yet plead with me to rescue and avenge her. They stir up memories of another girl I have now betrayed, so I reach out and slide her eyelids shut, murmuring soundlessly, "You will not know this purgatory for eternity, I promise."_

_These words I now wish I could have whispered to that girl long ago instead of chaining her within her own purgatory. _

_Rising to my feet, I finally turn back to him. He has wanted to flee since the moment he first saw me, but fear and some instinctual force have convinced him he could never outrun nor hide from me. The fear has him cowering in the corner, whimpering with terror at what he believes I will do to him. Letting my smile pull my lips back from my glistening teeth, I assure him, "The end will come quickly, I promise."_

_In response, his heart begins to pound. The pulse in his throat catches my eye, and I can feel and taste the venom surging in my mouth. Already I can imagine the thick, warm blood of this man who is more monster than human coursing through my veins, transforming my eyes to the deepest ebony to the most vivid crimson._

_We are buried too deep in the earth for anyone else to hear his last scream. It echoes painfully through my mind in the same instant that another scream does as well._

_But this second scream exists only in my head and is a memory of my sister screaming at the pain and fire of her new existence._

"Emily!"

Carlisle's voice, sounding so very far away and yet so close, reached me dimly through the sickening curtain of Edward's thoughts. Somewhere in the distance, a strangled scream cut off abruptly, and now the only sound breaking the heavy silence was loud sobbing.

Then suddenly the vision was gone as abruptly as it had come, leaving darkness in its place. I was no longer in that small, underground, brightly lit room, standing as silent witness to the horrors unfolding before me. Instead I was cradled in arms that had held me in my darkest moments, and Carlisle's voice, as soothing as always, asked from somewhere above me as his hand brushed across my face, "Emily, are you all right? What's wrong?"

My eyes fluttered open reluctantly to Carlisle's worried face above me. Most of the worry seemed to fade magically from his young face, but it still pooled in the depths of his onyx eyes and the sharp slash of the worry line between his eyebrows. I gasped suddenly, "Carlisle!" and moved to throw my arms around his neck. In response to his unanswered questions, I sobbed violently into his shoulder, "Oh, Carlisle, Edward's started to hunt!"

He understood without further explanation. Pushing me away gently, Carlisle said quietly, "Emily, tell me what happened."

I started to tell him as calmly as I could but stopped suddenly when our eyes met, and I saw mine reflected in his thoughts. And I died a thousand deaths.

No human had died by my hand or by my choice.

And yet my eyes were the same vivid scarlet they would have been if I had.


	18. Chapter 18

**Chapter Eighteen**

So many deaths ran before my eyes, so many murderers and rapists stalked and hunted down like the animals their hunter considered them.

And with every kill, with every life taken, with every life ended, I suffered as they suffered, as Edward suffered.

In our new home at Collinsport, I remained hidden away from the townspeople. My scarlet eyes were too unnatural and frightening for them, and at the same time, I also struggled against the overwhelming thirst that burned through my veins. For as Edward fed on our kind's intended prey, the burning thirst for their blood spilled over from his mind and body into mine.

Carlisle and Esme suffered also. I had always been the pure one who had triumphed against the very blackest instincts of our kind, and now every new day was another struggle to protect the innocent. Their darkest and bleakest--the ones they had prayed they would never have to see--playing out before their eyes, and they were powerless to stop them.

I had died a thousand deaths when first I saw my scarlet eyes reflected through Carlisle's, and I died a million more every time I caught a glimpse of my eyes in Carlisle or Esme's thoughts, but as the years wore on, I began to wish for those deaths to so easily take me. I could not bring myself to look Carlisle or Esme in the eyes, knowing the intense pain that would wash through them to see my scarlet eyes. And I loved them both too much to subject them to that pain.

Within our first month of our time in Collinsport, the Cullens were the latest gossip in town. The mayor and his wife, Randall and Phyllis Stevens, visited on our fourth day in our new home; they came on the pretense that Mayor Stevens made a point of welcoming all newcomers to Collinsport, especially when the patriarch of the new family was to take over the town's small hospital.

The three of us were arranging the parlor when the knock on the front door echoed through the house. Carlisle and Esme froze instantly, knowing that I was dangerous to these humans in so many ways. Esme asked quietly, "Should we even let them in the house?"

Looking at me, Carlisle said softly so the Stevenses wouldn't hear, "Emily, you shouldn't be around them. We can't take the risk of them noticing your eyes. They're too vivid to ignore, even if you don't make direct eye contact."

I nodded in agreement and murmured, "All right, I'll go upstairs. You can come up with a reasonable excuse for why I'm unable to meet them." Carlisle nodded and quickly thought up one on the spot; I smiled at his choice and dashed out of the room and up the wide staircase to the second floor.

From my room in the northeast corner of the house, I carefully monitored everything downstairs through both Carlisle and Esme's thoughts. Esme called out politely, "Just a moment please!" She moved gracefully to the front door and opened it with the elegance of a queen, feigning surprise to see the Stevenses standing on the front porch. With a polite smile, she queried, "Yes?"

Mayor Stevens replied brightly, "Good afternoon, Mrs. Cullen. Phyllis and I have come to welcome you and your husband to Collinsport."

Esme faked a brief look of confusion and then said, "Oh, Mayor Stevens!" She shook her head and apologized, opening the door wider, "I'm terribly sorry I didn't remember you, but so much has happened since we last met. Please, won't you both come inside?" They both stepped into the entrance hall far enough for Esme to shut the door behind them; Esme called, "Carlisle, dear, the Stevenses are here!"

At the sound of her voice, Carlisle came out of the front parlor, smoothing the shirt sleeves he'd rolled up to his elbows. His handsome face was lit with a brilliant smile, and he said, "Ah, Mayor Stevens, Mrs. Stevens! It's so nice to see you again." He quickly shook hands with Mayor Stevens (I chuckled silently at the slight shudder that rippled down Stevens's back at Carlisle's touch) and offered a small bow to Mrs. Stevens. Sliding his hands into the pockets of his trousers, he queried, "May I ask what brings you here this afternoon?"

Mayor Stevens answered, "Well, Phyllis and I make a point of welcoming any newcomers to Collinsport, and we'd decided to give you some time to settle in before bombarding you with social calls."

"Oh, that's so nice of you," Esme told them warmly. Her smile slipped a little as she said, "I'm afraid we don't have much food or drink to offer you, but you're welcome to come sit down in the parlor." The Stevenses followed her and Carlisle into the parlor they'd just vacated, where Edward's piano sat in one corner. Helping Carlisle move boxes from the sofa, Esme said to the Stevenses, "Please, sit down. I'm terribly sorry for the mess, but I'm afraid that we're just now getting around to unpacking the parlor."

Mrs. Stevens sat down next to her husband and stated with a smile, "There's no need to apologize, Mrs. Cullen. I'm sure it will be a lovely room once you've had time to settle in." Her eyes swept around the room and landed on the piano. "Do you play the piano, Mrs. Cullen?"

Settling into a winged chair next to Carlisle, Esme answered, "Please, call me Esme. And unfortunately, I do not play the piano. That good fortune fell to my younger brother and sister, Edward and Emily."

Suddenly Mrs. Stevens remembered Carlisle's brief mention of his wife's younger siblings. She remarked, "Ah, I remember your husband mentioning them in passing." Pursing her lips quickly, she questioned, "May we meet them?"

Carlisle answered abruptly, "I'm terribly sorry, Mrs. Stevens, but I'm afraid that's just not possible." He didn't need my talent to tell him the confusion that ran through the Stevenes' thoughts. With a heavy sigh, Carlisle explained, "Emily has always been especially frail--her immune system is much more fragile than most, so she falls ill often. And her condition only worsens under stressful circumstances, and the last two weeks have been perhaps the most stressful in her eighteen years."

Mayor Stevens' brow furrowed with concern, and his thoughts flickered to his own eighteen-year-old daughter. "If I'm not being rude, Dr. Cullen," he asked, "may I query as to why the last two weeks have been stressful?"

This time, Esme explained, "I'm afraid that our brother Edward left the family, and Emily has not taken the news well. She and Edward are very close, so she was heartbroken to hear that he was abandoning us for some girl he'd met in Vancouver." Carlisle's eyebrow rose so slightly that the Stevenses didn't notice; Esme gave him a shrug too minute for a human's eyes to spot.

Clearing his throat, Carlisle added, "Yes, and a cross-country move from Vancouver to Maine only added more stress. I'm afraid that she's just getting over a bout of Spanish influenza that unfortunately also left her with a mild case of pneumonia. As of now, she's still well enough that I can take care of her here at home, but if she gets much worse, I will have to check her into the hospital."

The situation needed to sound more real. So I called out weakly, just loudly enough that the sound would travel down the stairs, "Esme?" I added a loud cough that matched Carlisle's memories of pneumonia patients. Esme quietly excused herself from the parlor and came up the stairs; the instant she walked into my room, I whispered quickly, "Esme, they can barely hear us. You have to act like you're actually taking care of me."

Esme nodded and asked gently, "What's wrong, Emily?" Instead of answering, I faked another loud cough. Downstairs, Carlisle and the Stevenses were listening carefully; the Stevenses heard only Esme's soft voice and the weak moans and coughs of a sick girl they hadn't met, but Carlisle heard the truth and had to hide his smile behind his hands. Just before she left, Esme queried, "Is there anything else I can do for you, sister?"

I shook my head and moaned weakly, "No, thank you, sister." Then, dropping my voice drastically, I told her, "When you go back downstairs, tell Carlisle you think he should check on me again. The Stevenses are wondering if he should anyway." Esme nodded and murmured in reply, "I'll send Carlisle up to check on you, dear, before you go back to sleep." She smiled surreptituously and shut the door behind her.

Back downstairs in the parlor, Esme asked, "Carlisle, dear, will you go check on Emily? I think her cough is getting worse."

"Of course, sweetheart," Carlisle replied, getting up from his chair, having heard both conversations Esme and I had shared. He moved silently up the stairs and shut the bedroom door behind him. With the door closed, it was impossible for the Stevenses to hear us, so I just had to fake the occasional cough. _I must admit,_ Carlisle thought with a smile, _you must be one of the most skilled actors I've seen in a long time. You seemed to have perfected the cough of a pneumonia patient._

Smiling up at him, I answered almost soundlessly, "I should. Your memories were my inspiration." With another fake cough, I asked quietly, "Spanish influenza? Really?" Carlisle grinned widely._ You were lucky you didn't catch it last time, _he replied, _so I decided you couldn't be so lucky a second time._

When Carlisle went back downstairs, Mrs. Stevens had started a conversation about Esme's possibly taking a teaching position at the elementary school. But Esme politely declined, saying, "I'm sorry, Mrs. Stevens, but since Carlisle will soon be busy over at the hospital, someone will have to take care of Emily during the day. I just wouldn't be able to leave her alone."

The Stevenses left that evening just after the sun had set, so Esme and Carlisle accompanied them out to their car. Not long after that, Carlisle heard a rumor at the hospital that the handsome young Cullen couple were harboring a dying girl in their mansion, a dying girl who may or may not have loved her dearest brother more than she should have.

If only they had known the truth.


	19. Chapter 19

**Chapter Nineteen**

Four years, eight months, and six days. One thousand, seven hundred, and eleven days. Two hundred and forty-four murderers and rapists killed. Four hundred and thirty-five victims avenged.

He had begun to waver in his new way of life after only a year. The guilt was starting to gnaw at his conscience, but he was stubborn, just as he always had been and always would be. He fought against the guilt that whispered to him he had not been meant for a life of murder, tried to ignore the memories of the sister he'd betrayed that flashed through his mind with every kill.

And while he clung stubbornly to the life he'd chosen for himself, I knew he would surrender one day. I knew him perhaps better than he knew himself, and I knew he was not meant to live the life of a murderer, no matter how he justified it. The face of the mother we had both loved was fading from his memories, but he did remember how she'd wept at the mere thought that her beloved Edward might go off to war and possibly take the lives of the sons of other mothers. And as long as her fading face still burned in his thoughts, he knew what he was doing was wrong.

By 1931, when Edward and I should have turned thirty, Carlisle, Esme, and I were still living in tiny little Collinsport, Maine. But what had once been a promising, bustling coastal town had become a near abandoned town too impoverished to support itself much less its citizens. The small bank down the street from Carlisle's hospital had gone under in 1930, and it took with it the life savings of most of Collinsport's citizens, including those of Mayor Stevens himself. What would quickly become the Great Depression had hit Collinsport much earlier and much harder than most cities and towns; most of the formerly illustrious families left town shortly after the bank floundered, hoping to find new fortunes and better luck elsewhere. When summer of 1931 dawned that year, only a handful of families remained: Mayor Stevens and his wife and three children, including his now twenty-two daughter and her husband and new baby; the Finleys, who had owned the bank before its failure; the Greens, whose ancestors had founded Collinsport in 1756; and the Cullens, whose patriarch headed the hospital and was as handsome as the day was long.

Among the few families that remained, ours was the only one that did not lose every last penny of their fortune. Carlisle, who had always had a sense for stocks, had carefully watched his few investments and had then quietly sold them when things were starting to look bad. Esme and I were quite impressed with the skill he showed in his investments--four days later, the stock market crashed on Tuesday, October 29, 1929. Then, when the first banks had begun to fail, he left Collinsport for a week, traveled to all the major US cities where he'd established bank accounts, and discreetly withdrawn the money in his accounts. His cautious foresight saved us from utter destitution because by the end of the Great Depression, seven of the eight banks where Carlisle had held bank accounts had failed.

I knew when Edward had decided to come back. The vivid visions of his kills had begun to fade in my own mind, perhaps because he was beginning to kill only out of necessity rather than want. His heart, as frozen and unbeating as it was, was no longer in every kill, and he was waiting longer and longer between each one, testing himself on how long he could go before hunting again. Now, every time he hunted, the things that passed before my eyes were twinged with guilt, and he had begun to whisper the same words to every victim in their final seconds: "I'm sorry."

On Christmas day in 1931, Carlisle, Esme, and I settled down for what they thought would be another melancholy Christmas without Edward. Carlisle had settled into his favorite armchair between the fireplace and the large picture window overlooking the coast, rereading his now worn copy of _Grey's Anatomy_; Esme was sitting at her writing desk, sketching out plans for a house she wanted to build. To comfort them a little, I sank onto the bench at Edward's piano and started playing some of their favorite songs.

But as midnight drew near, Carlisle was suddenly staring into the fire, Esme was absently doodling along the bottom of her houseplans, and I was picking out a few random notes on the piano. And then I heard it.

_Emily._

Outside, he was pale against the black waves crashing along the shore behind him. The snow that had fallen all that week seemed gray next to his skin in the moonlight; the ebony velvet sky above him matched his eyes. I might have fallen in love with him if I had been a normal girl, if I hadn't already loved him as my brother.

Carlisle and Esme gave no second thought to me as I silently rose from the piano bench and left the house; I had long ago begun to disappear during the night for long walks along the rocky coast.

The bitter wind blowing in off the ocean softly ruffled Edward's hair as he stood motionless at the water's edge, watching the waves crash at his feet. His bronze hair had frozen into dark icy strands, one of them falling like a black line across his smooth forehead. I didn't make a sound as I drew near, but he didn't need to hear me to know I was.

When I'd drawn up to his side, Edward sighed softly and murmured, "I couldn't do it anymore, Emily. No matter how I tried, I could no longer justify it. I tried to tell myself that the people I killed could hardly count as humans, especially after all of the terrible things they'd done. But in the end, I couldn't go on. Those lives I ended were still lives, and now they'll always rest on my shoulders."

I couldn't offer him the words that would comfort him because there were none. So instead I reached out, took his hand, and whispered, "I've missed you, brother."

The small, crooked smile he'd inherited from our father turned one side of his mouth. It had not lit up his face in close to four years, and he thought for a flashing second that it felt out of place.

And then he noticed the dark scarlet color of my eyes fading into black.

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**A/N: **Wow, I think this might possibly be a record for me. But it only reminds me that I don't own Twilight. Oh sad day.


	20. Chapter 20

**Chapter Twenty**

"Oh my God, what have I done to you?" Edward wailed loudly, breaking away and covering his face in shame. I tried to assure him that it wasn't his fault, but he shook his head and insisted, "No, no, I did this to you, Emily. I know you too well; absolutely nothing in this world would make you turn from Carlisle's way of life. This is my fault!"

I grabbed him by the wrists and pulled his hands away from his face. Dropping my voice to a soothing tone, I murmured, "Edward, this is not your fault. None of us knew things would end up this way, and it doesn't matter anyway. Neither one of us will be this way again in all the years we will walk through this world. I still have faith enough to believe that."

His dark eyes locked onto mine. This was how we read each other, in both the past and the present―a fleeting glance secretively shared; a flickering of the eyes so minute that those who knew us best were oblivious; the long, blatant stare that bared our very souls or whatever we had to resemble souls in this existence. So, as our eyes met and I felt the familiar brush of his conscience against my own, I let the few barriers remaining between us crumble into dust and lay bare all my memories of those painful years without him.

He tried to hide from me the waves of disgust and guilt that rippled down his spine with each new memory. But I knew him too well to ignore the way he shuddered violently to relive his own memories seen backwards from the end to the beginning through the additional layer of mine.

When he came to that very first kill, the one with that beautiful dead young woman with those familiar eyes of clear emerald, Edward cried out in pain. His mind fled from mine in a swift surrender, and he could no longer bring himself to look me in the eyes. Because instead of the scarlet eyes fading to black that he should have seen, he saw those emerald eyes of two girls―one slipping closer to eternal darkness with each beat of her slowing heart, the other already caught in the darkness of purgatory and begging for a release.

It was then that I understood. Every girl, every woman, every child who had been stalked, raped, beaten, slaughtered in the dark, was just another victim that he could protect and avenge because he'd failed to do the same for the girl who'd been the most important to him. The innocents he was protecting all had the same face and body in his mind: the pale, blood- and tear-streaked face and broken body of the sister he had promised and failed to protect, those vivid eyes slipping shut with every fading heartbeat, every shallow breath barely filling the nearly unmoving chest, the sickeningly tempting blood that taunted and teased him and of which he so nearly drank his fill.

And all of Edward's victims, the men who were barely more human than what he considered himself, had the face of the man responsible for plunging the only girl Edward had ever loved into eternal darkness.

If impossibilities could have become possibilities, so many would have happened in that very moment. My heart would have broken into a thousand pieces to see Edward racked with such guilt over something that had happened so very long ago. Tears would have been streaking my cheeks to know the overwhelming love for his only sister that Edward held in that frozen, silent heart; even after shattering like glass, my heart would mend itself with this staggering love for my brother that renewed itself in my chest.

"I condemned you to this hell, Emily," Edward whispered brokenly in response to my thoughts. "If I'd truly loved you as I claimed to, I would have stayed there with you, held your hand as you finally slipped from this world, envied you for the light you would finally know in the darkness. But instead I reached out to you in my own selfishness and demanded of Carlisle to bring you to this life where I would have you always. In those last moments, I should have known that I would be damning the purest, most beautiful soul I had ever known to an eternity in hell. I should have reached out only to offer some comfort to the sister I loved in her final moments, to assure her tortured, dying soul that her beloved brother had loved her for every second of every day."

He sobbed once and turned away from me. "But instead, I chained her in a timeless purgatory where every day is another walk through the very blackest fires of hell. And why? Because I loved her."

I murmured in reply, blinking back the venom that stung at my eyes, "This existence is no purgatory, Edward." He laughed weakly, bitterly, sarcastically. Touching his arm gently, I told him, "And I will gladly walk through every circle of Hell every single day as my punishment for this existence because that is a burden I will graciously carry on my shoulders if it means you and I will always be together." He shook his head in protest. I asked, a sob catching in my throat, "Edward, do you think I could hate you for saving me from the darkness that was closing over me? Do you think I could hate the one person in this world who still loved me even when no one else did? Do you think I could ever regret that you were the one who found me that night when I was drowning in the black waters of my misery and pain, brought me back to the surface, and breathed life into me again? Do you think I could wish that I had died there on that floor, that my short, pain-filled life could be ended in such a violent and brutal manner? Do you think I could lament that in my last minutes, the person I loved most brought me to a life that, even in its blackest moments, was a thousand times better than the life I had already known for eighteen years?"

Edward's eyes as they moved back to my face were filled with an immeasurable sadness. It would take many years for him to believe every word I spoke that cold, Christmas night, and it would take many more for him to stop blaming himself for damning me to an existence he had considered hell on earth for our kind. But as he gently brushed his fingers across my cheek and whispered through the dark, "Of course not," it was a start.

* * *

**A/N: **Don't worry, I didn't change a thing in the story itself. I just forgot to add that this story ends here. But I have the first chapter of my next story _A Family Affair, Part Two_ posted already. So please feel free to check it out!


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